Programme
The first day introduces the participants to the domain of ontological analysis and gives background information on logic and its use in ontology. From the second to the fifth day there will be 4 courses (two in the morning and two in the afternoon, 1h30m each).
Monday, 16 July 2012
(room A206, "Fabio Ferrari" Hub, University of Trento, via Sommarive 5, Povo di Trento)
09:00 - 09:10 Introduction to the IAOA Summer School
09:10 - 10:30 Introduction to applied ontology and ontological analysis
Nicola Guarino, Laboratory for Applied Ontology ISTC-CNR, Trento
10:30 - 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 - 12:30 Introduction to applied ontology and ontological analysis
Nicola Guarino, Laboratory for Applied Ontology ISTC-CNR, Trento
12:30 - 14:00 Lunch (canteen of the Bruno Kessler Foundation, via Sommarive 18, Povo di Trento)
14:00 - 15:30 Introduction to first order logic for knowledge representation
Chiara Ghidini and Luciano Serafini, Bruno Kessler Foundation, Trento
15:30 - 16:00 Coffee Break
16:00 - 17:30 Introduction to first order logic for knowledge representation
Chiara Ghidini and Luciano Serafini, Bruno Kessler Foundation, Trento
Tuesday, 17 July 2012 -- Friday, 20 July 2012
(room A206, "Fabio Ferrari" Hub, University of Trento, via Sommarive 5, Povo di Trento)
09:00 - 10:30 Ontology, lexicon and cognitive science
Christiane Fellbaum, Dept. of Computer Science, Princeton University and
Amanda Hicks, Dept. of Philosophy, University at Buffalo
10:30 - 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 - 12:30 Ontological analysis: the philosophical perspective
Kevin Mulligan, Dept. of Philosophy, Université de Genève
12:30 - 14:00 Lunch (canteen of the Bruno Kessler Foundation, via Sommarive 18, Povo di Trento)
14:00 - 15:30 Logical tools for ontological analysis
Chiara Ghidini and Luciano Serafini, Bruno Kessler Foundation, Trento
15:30 - 16:00 Coffee Break
16:00 - 17:30 Ontology-driven conceptual modelling
Giancarlo Guizzardi, Dept. of Computer Science, Federal University of Espírito Santo
17:30 - 18:15 Discussion
Short description of courses
A graph by Todd Schneider shows how he thinks the different areas covered by the summer school could be organized
(.cmap version, .png version).
Introduction to applied ontology and ontological analysis, Nicola Guarino.
Applied Ontology is an emerging interdisciplinary area of research which builds on philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics and logic with the purpose of understanding, clarifying, making explicit and communicating people's assumptions about the nature and structure of the world. This orientation towards helping people understanding each other distinguishes applied ontology from philosophical ontology, and motivates its unavoidable interdisciplinary nature. In this brief introductory course I will introduce the notion of a computational ontology intended as an engineering artifact, and I will illustrate the applications and the role of such artifacts in the context of information systems design. I will finally give a flavor of the basic tools of (formal) Ontological Analysis, arguing that, while Applied Ontology was motivated initially by the need of helping people (and computers) to understand each other, now Ontological Analysis is gradually evolving as a general analysis tool which complements other disciplines, such as engineering, medicine, or sociology.
Introduction to first order logic for knowledge representation, Chiara Ghidini and Luciano Serafini.
In this course we will introduce the main ingredients of a logic for knowledge representation: the formal language, used to specify the knowledge, the formal model, which provide an abstract representation of the real world, the formal interpretation which links the formal language with the formal model, and the intuitive interpretation which links the formal language and model to the real world aspect. We will provide the notion of logical consequence, of calculus (as an algorithm for determining logical consequence) and the notion of soundness and completeness. All the above concepts will be exemplified in the case of First order Logic.
Ontology, lexicon and cognitive science, Christiane Fellbaum.
Both ontologies and lexicons aim to represent the meanings of entities and their interrelations. While ontologies describe concepts--abstract, language-independent entities--lexicons contain words with concrete phonetic, morphological and syntactic properties. Large-scale models of the lexicon such as WordNet show that words can be arranged into structures that closely resemble ontologies. Such "lexical ontologies" are motivated independently by psycholinguistic experiments revealing speakers' mental organization of the lexicon and by analyses of actual language use in corpora. Moreover, WordNets have been constructed for dozens of languages, supporting the universal validity of this model of the lexicon and our strategies for distinguishing and naming entities in the world. We address the question to what extent our thinking about ontology might be influenced by the lexicon. We discuss the practical challenges and theoretical consequences of attempts to map WordNet to a formal ontology. Finally, we examine some real-world applications of WordNet.
Ontological analysis: the philosophical perspective, Kevin Mulligan.
This course presents a philosophical perspective on applied ontology and discusses a number of ideas that have recently attracted much attention in philosophy, in "pure" metaphysics and in ontology. After an introduction of the core notions on which ontology relies (like the distinction between objects, properties, relations, states of affairs or facts, parthood and dependence), we will focus on theories of the relations between two families of categories: on the one hand we look at categories like that of object, property, relation and kind, and on the other at the categories of substance, event, disposition, quantity, quality, tendency etc. Our aim is to clarify the relationship between these two families. Another point of investigation will be the notion of existence. Here the discussion will consider existence as expressed by the classical logical quantifier and theories of its relation to so-called modes of existence of different sorts of entity: the mode of existence of substances is endurance, events and processes occur, creatures are alive, states of affairs obtain etc.

Introductions (in English, German, French and Italian)
  • Johansson, I. 2004, Ontological Investigations, Frankfurt : ontos verlag
  • Lando, G. 2010, Ontologia. Un'Introduzione, Rome : Carocci
  • Lowe, J. 2006, The Four-Category Ontology, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  • Meixner, U. 2004, Einfuhrung in die Ontologie, Darmstadt : Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
  • Mulligan, K. 2000, Métaphysique et Ontologie, (dir.) P. Engel, Précis de Philosophie analytique, Collection Thémis, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 5-33.
    Italian tr., 2002, Metafisica e ontologia, Aut Aut, 310-311, 116-143.
  • Varzi, A. 2005, Ontologia, Laterza
    2010 Ontologie, Paris : Ithaque
Existence vs Modes of Being
  • Miller, B., Existence, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • McGinn, C., Existence, ch. 2 Logical Properties. Identity, Existence, Predication, Necessity, Truth, Oxford UP, 15-68
  • Mulligan, K. 2003, Forms of Life or Ways of Life (Modes of Being), Rivista di estetica, n.s., 24 (3 / 2003), XLIII, pp. 103-105, Rosenberg and Sellier, Bozzetti In memoria di Paolo Bozzi
  • McDaniel, K. 2012, A Return to the Analogy of Being.
Types (species, substantival universals, kinds) and their tokens (instances) vs Properties (determinable vs determinate) and their Bearers. Relations and Connectors
Logical tools for ontological analysis, Chiara Ghidini and Luciano Serafini.
The objective of this course is the introduction of some important formal tools that are currently used in the specification of ontologies. We will introduce the family of Description Logics, analyze the expressiveness and the limitations. Some possible extensions/alternative to DL will be introduced. As a further aspect we will consider the problem of integrating heterogeneous ontologies and the problem of semantic matching. Finally we will dedicate some time in the development of practical ontologies and in the use of tools to support them such as MOKI, Protege, and DL reasoners.

Description logics for ontological modeling. Introduction of the basic principle of description logics. Different families of description logics and families of the semantic web language (OWL). Expressive power of logic languages for ontologies. What is the expressive power of a logic, examples of limitations of expressive power of DL via bisimilation. Example and comparison of languages with different expressive power. How to prove formally that one language is more/less expressive or is equivalent to another logical language. Creating real world ontologies. A set of examples in the construction of concrete ontologies. Examples are taken from modelling processes, modeling mereological relations, etc. Heterogeneous ontologies, ontology integration. The problem of heterogeneous axiomatization and heterogeneous models, and the problem of combining/constraining heterogeneus models and the logics that formalizes the integration of heterogeneous ontologies.
Ontology-driven conceptual modelling, Giancarlo Guizzardi.
The main objective of this course is to introduce researchers to the theory and practice of a new emerging discipline named Ontology-Driven Conceptual Modeling. In this discipline, theories coming from areas such as Formal Ontology in philosophy, but also Cognitive Science, Philosophical Logics and Linguistics are employed to derive engineering tools (e.g., modeling languages, methodologies, design patterns, model compilers and simulators) for improving the theory and practice of Conceptual Modeling, in general, and Domain Ontology Engineering, in particular. In this course, the expressiveness and relevance of these theories and derived tools are demonstrated through their application to solve some classical and recurrent modeling problems concerning the well-founded representation of: classification and taxonomic structures, part-whole relations, intrinsic and relational properties, formal and material associations, association specialization, attribute conceptual spaces, roles and events.

The main reference for the material presented in this course is: Introductory material can be found in: Classes and Taxonomic Structures
  • Guizzardi, G., Wagner, G., Guarino, N., van Sinderen, M., 2004, An Ontologically Well-Founded Profile for UML Conceptual Models, in A. Persson, J. Stirna (eds.) Advanced Information Systems Engineering, Proceedings of16th International Conference, (CAiSE 2004), Riga, Latvia, June 2004, Springer Verlag, pp. 112-126.
Part-whole relations Ontology of Relations Attribute, weak entities and datatypes Role Modeling Methodological Aspects