Faculty
Bodil Nistrup Madsen & Hanne Erdman Thomsen

Course Coordinator
Bodil Nistrup Madsen

This course focuses on methods and tools for developing ontologies as a basis for consistent and user-oriented classification systems, taxonomies and data models.

Concept clarification and knowledge organization is a very important prerequisite for digitization, where precise definitions and a common understanding of concepts are crucial. Knowledge organization and concept clarification build on knowledge modelling by means of ontologies, which gives a formalized description of knowledge.

Examples of applications where knowledge modelling is needed are e-government, public web portals, e-commerce, ERP and IT architecture.

The main focus of the course is to introduce students to the most recent methods and tools for modelling knowledge and give them a background for structuring and representing knowledge in the form of ontologies as a basis for many different applications.

The course will introduce cases illustrating problems that are likely to arise when the development of classification systems and metadata taxonomies is not based on a proper structuring (ontology) of the domain in question. Examples of problems are overlapping classes or categories and inconsistent structure.

Students will learn how to develop ontologies that can serve as a basis for the work carried out by IT developers. The course will illustrate the problems that arise when design and development of IT systems are not based on clarification and definition of the concepts underlying the information model of the systems. When developing for example XML schemas as a basis for an XML document, it is certainly not enough to focus on the structure. Equal attention should be paid to the structure (syntax) and the meaning of the elements in the structure (semantics). This is also true for the development of databases, where the information model (conceptual data model) should be based on an ontology (concept model).

The course will be based on lectures combined with workshops and case discussions. One or more guest lecturers will present practical experience in the field of knowledge modelling.

Students will be able to structure, represent and manage knowledge as a prerequisite for design and development of solutions for many purposes.

At the end of the course, students should:

Individual 10-15 page paper. 7-point grading scale.

· Calero, Coral; Francisco Ruiz & Mario Piattini (eds.). 2006. Ontologies for Software Engineering and Software Technology. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer Verlag. (Udvalgte kapitler)

· CEN CWA 15045 (2004). Multilingual Catalogue Strategies for eCommerce and eBusiness.

· Gómez-Pérez, Asunción; Mariano Fernández-López & Oscar Corcho. 2004. Ontological Engineering – with examples from the areas of Knowledge Management, e-Commerce and the Semantic Web. London: Springer Verlag. (Udvalgte kapitler)

· Guarino, Nicola (1998). Formal Ontology in Information Systems, Proceedings of the First International Conference (FOIS'98), June 6-8, Trento, Italy. Ed. Nicola Guarino. Amsterdam: IOS Press. (Udvalgte kapitler)

· Madsen, Bodil Nistrup, Hanne Erdman Thomsen & Carl Vikner. 2004. ”Principles of a system for terminological concept modelling”. In: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Vol. I. Lisbon: 15-18.

· Madsen, Bodil Nistrup, Hanne Erdman Thomsen & Carl Vikner. 2005. “Multidimensionality in terminological concept modelling”. In: Bodil Nistrup Madsen, Hanne Erdman Thomsen (eds.): Terminology and Content Development, TKE 2005, 7th International Conference on Terminology and Knowledge Engineering, Copenhagen: 161-173.

· Pisanelli, D.M., Gangemi, A. & Steve, G. (2002) ‘Ontologies and Information Systems: the Marriage of the Century?’ Proceedings of the LYEE Workshop, Paris