Knowledge Bases and Ontologies

Knowledge bases and ontologies are becoming more and more common in
applications requiring some form of knowledge representation and
reasoning. Typically, in such applications traditional database
technology is inadequate and more general mechanisms are required. As
examples, consider Watson, the Jeopardy-playing program, and Gene
Ontology, an indispensable tool in medical and molecular biology
research.

The seminar will address the following topics (the list is tentative):

General ontologies:
-- Yago 
-- Freebase/Google Knowledge Graph
-- Concept Net 
-- NELL 
-- CYC  
-- Basic Formal Ontology
-- Wolfram|Alpha

Area ontologies:
-- SNOMED CT (incl. DL)
-- medical and biological (OBO) 
-- Dublin Core 
-- electronic patient records
-- Virtual Earth 

Knowledge bases and tools:
-- inference and reasoning
-- Watson
-- ontology construction
-- ontology-based querying
-- Protege
-- ontologies and rules, RIF 
-- ontology matching 
-- ontology evolution 
-- Linked Data
-- Semantic Web

Foundations:
-- descriptions logics 
-- Datalog +/- 
-- OWL 2.0

Further issues:
-- inconsistency and incompleteness
-- Turing test

Evaluation:
-- 1-2 class presentations and reports  based on current literature