AIC Seminar Series

This talk intends to convey the basic Ideas of ontology engineering in a simple, visual appealing and entertaining, yet didactically founded way. Its target audience is the novice who is interested in formal ontology creation. The peculiarities in designing description logics based terminologies are introduced in traceable everyday examples (Cutlery) and the audience is given the opportunity to follow the sometimes frustrating experiences that novice knowledge managers encounter when starting an ontology engineering effort. This talk will highlight some properties of domains which characterize them as easy or difficult to model and will show that even domains perceived as simple can turn out to require quite complex models in order to be correct. We will start to naively build a taxonomy of cutlery classes and expand the ontologies’ semantics in a step-wise requirement-driven way, justifying each addition in expressivity in a use case driven manner.

Dipl. Biol. Dr. Daniel Schober is a Neurobiologist by training (University Hamburg, Germany), who archieved his PhD in the field of Frames-based knowledge engineering at the Carite Humboldt University, Berlin. While doing a post-doc at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Cambridge, UK, Dr. Schober headed the ontology working group of the metabolomics standards Initiative (MSI) and was core developer for the Ontology of Biomedical Investigations (OBI). Dr. Schobers main interest is devoted to labeling guidelines in terminological engineering and he created the ontology naming conventions for the OBO Foundry, the main ’best practice’ and policy provider in the biomedical terminology field. He published tools like OntoCheck to foster lexical coherence and easing ontology alignment efforts. Since 2009 he is a senior researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Medical Biometry and Medical Informatics (IMBI) at the University Medical Center Freiburg, Germany, where he leads the ontology workpackage in the DebugIT EU-Project. He is the main researcher on the German side of the NTDO collaboration between UFPE-Brazil and IMBI-Germany.