Ph.D. Course on
REPRESENTATION FORMALISMS FOR ONTOLOGIES

October 30 - November 1, 2002
Copenhagen, Denmark

In connection with the conference FQAS2002, 5th International conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems, October 27-29, 2002.

The course is mainly aimed at phd students in computer science, linguistics and philosophy. It addresses foundational issues in building ontologies. The primary objective of the course is to expose students to main questions in this area and to survey some currently fashionable tools and logics.

COURSE MATERIAL

The following is a supplement to the printed handouts given during the course.

• Enrico Franconi: Slides, Additional material.
• Patrick Lambrix: Slides 1, Slides 2.
• Jørgen Fischer Nilsson: Slides.
• Bodil Nistrup Madsen: Slides.
• Werner Ceusters: Slides.

KEY THEMES

Key themes are the following:

• Logical languages for ontologies
• Parthood and other relationships in ontologies
• Conceptual vs. linguistic ontologies

LECTURES

Each lecturer will give a 2 - 5 hours talk including time for questions and discussion and for letting the participants solve small modeling problems in groups.

• Enrico Franconi (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy):
  "Description Logics for Conceptual Design, Information Access, and Ontology Integration: Research Trends"
  In the course I will argue that good Conceptual Modelling and Ontology Design is required to support powerful Query Management and to allow for semantic based Information Integration. The arguments is based on the use of description Logics as a formal tool for the framework. The course is structured into three parts:
• In the first part, an extended ontology language and a methodology for conceptual and ontology design will be introduced. A demo of the i.com ontology design tool will be given.
  
• In the second part, the query management problem in the presence of the previously devised conceptual model will be considered: a global framework will be introduced, together with various basic tasks involved in information access.
  
• In the last part, general issues about ontology integration will be presented.
  
Slides, Additional material.


• Patrick Lambrix (Linkoping University, Sweden):
  "Part-whole reasoning and Ontologies"

Part-whole hierarchies (together with is-a hierarchies) are a natural way for humans to organize and represent entities in order to manage and reason about the world. There is also an awareness that part-whole relationships are important forknowledge representation. A knowledge representation system supporting part-whole relations would need to define a flexible representation of different kinds of part-whole relations.
In these lectures we discuss mereology, the study of the part-whole relation and introduce a number of possible ways to define part-whole. Further, we look at description logics-based knowledge representation systems that have integrated part-whole and is-a reasoning.
Slides 1, Slides 2.


• Jørgen Fischer Nilsson (Technical University of Denmark, Denmark):
  "Some Foundational Issues in Ontological Engineering"

In the first lecture we identify some of the key notions and problems in the design of ontologies. We try to conduct the analysis free of commitment to any particular representation formalism.
In the second lecture we then survey formal (logical and algebraic) approaches to ontologies by using predicate logic as metalogic in which ontological notions such as class, property, and relationship etc. become encoded as terms.
Slides.


• Frederik Stjernfelt (Copenhagen University, Denmark):
  "An introduction on Husserl and ontologies"
  The lecture will introduce to Husserl's concepts on ontologies and related issues: Antipsychologism and the "theory of theories"; the distinction between formal and material (or regional) ontologies; the relation between formal ontology and formal logic; the relation between material ontologies and the special sciences (with a comment on Barry Smith); the Husserlian notion of the synthetic a priori; the epistemological access to ideal objects by categorial intuition (with a comment on Peirce); the idea of a mereological calculus for the description of things ontological.

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM

Thursday, October 31

Friday, November 1

VENUE

The venue will be:

• Copenhagen Business School
  Solbjerg Plads 3
  2000 Frederiksberg

Main lecture room is SP212. Find local maps here, but please notice that the address is Solbjerg Plads 3 (not to confuse with Solbjergvej 3).

MORE INFORMATION AND REGISTRATION

The number of participants is strictly limited, so please sign up as soon as possible. All researchers are welcome but PhD students will be given priority. PhD students are kindly asked to attach a brief description of topic of PhD project (with keywords).

Participation in the course is free.
Participation in 3 lunches and 1 dinner (October 31) costs 120 euro.
Please contact us by email for registration.

Hanne Erdman Thomsen,
Copenhagen Business School
Bernhard Bangs Allé 17B, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: +45 3815 3131 Fax: +45 3815 3820
Email: het.id@cbs.dk

Troels Andreasen
Roskilde University, Building 42-1,
P.O.Box 260, DK 4000 Roskilde, DENMARK
Phone: +45 4674 3835 Fax: +45 4674 3072
Email: troels@ruc.dk