Call for Participation

(NeOn) Summer Course on Computational Ontologies

Dates

15-18, September 2008

Venue

University of Bologna, Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Informazione, Mura Anteo Zamboni 7, 40124 Bologna, Italy

Schedule

Course duration: 20 h

Course time table:

Monday 15th: 10:30 - 13:00, 14.30 - 17:00 Tuesday 16th: 10:30 - 13:00, 14.30 - 17:00 Wednesday 17th: 10:30 - 13:00, 14.30 - 17:00 Thursday 18th: 10:30 - 13:00, 14.30 - 17:00

General topics

Web ontology design. Use of existing tools and requirements for new tools supporting ontology design. Web ontology design.

Target audience

PhD, and PhD students in Computer Science, Information Technology, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, Logics, Philosophy, Computational Linguistics, and other disciplines that employ or might be considering employing techniques and theories connected with the semantic technologies with particolar focus on Semantic Web technologies. Master students in the above mentioned disciplines who are developing a master thesis or plan to be enrolled in a PhD course on these arguments.

Program

Computational ontologies: what they are and how to use them. Languages for ontologies: First Order Logic, Description Logics, and differences with software engineering-oriented languages (eg: UML, E/R). The Semantic Web language stack: RDF and OWL. Existing tools which support OWL-RDF: exercises. Components of ontology design: CODO, ODM. Brief introduction on linguistic frames. Pattern-based ontology design. Limits of existing tools in terms of support for modular design of ontologies. Research issues and challenges.

Final evaluation

Students are required to develop a small project and will be organized in small teams. Projects will include the realization of an OWL ontology by applying pattern-based ontology design. The ontology has to be formalized by using the tools presented during the course. The use of such tools will allow students to test and evaluate them.

Projects can be about either the design of a specific ontology for a given domain or for a given computational/business task (e.g., a model for public administration, healthy system, multimedia management, etc) or the use of ontologies for a specific service.

Students evaluation will be based on checking the knowledge they acquired about topics discussed during the course. Particular attention will be given to the projects that will be developed in the course.

Lecturer

Aldo Gangemi[1] Semantic Technology Laboratory Institute of Cognitive Science and Technologies (CNR), Rome

Lecturer assistants

Valentina Presutti[2] Semantic Technology Laboratory Institute of Cognitive Science and Technologies (CNR), Rome

Eva Blomqvist[3] Linköping University, Jönköping

Application

Applications must be submitted by email to vpresutti@gmail.com before September 9th 2008. Applicants must include a short curriculum vita. Registration is free, since the course is sponsored by the EU FP6 project NeOn[4] in collaboration with the Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Informazione of the University of Bologna[5]. Participants are expected to attend all the classes of the course.

For details regarding, traveling, hotels, logistic information and any further information, please email to vpresutti@gmail.

[1] http://www.istc.cnr.it/createhtml.php?nbr=71

[2] http://www.istc.cnr.it/createhtml.php?nbr=124, http://presutti.web.cs.unibo.it

[3] http://hem.hj.se/~blev/index.htm

[4] http://www.neon-project.org

[5] http://www.cs.unibo.it