The Applied Semantics Summer Camp took place in the week of August 22 - 26 near Carmarthen, Wales.
This was an informal time of teaching and exploration on the industrial application of applied ontology. This event was aimed at business analysts and systems analysts wishing to extend their skill set into this new and we think profitable area where technology meets applied philosophy. The intended outcome was for participants to be able confidently to create or extend reference ontologies for use in integration and reporting and beyond. A technical track focussed on different physical applications of semantic technology while the business track dived deeper into conceptual semantics.
The course started with a basic grounding in cognitive science and philosophy, followed by more detailed development of the new methodology. Areas covered included classification theory, concept formation, terminology, re-use of established ontologies and so on. Invited speakers covered a number of aspects of these topics. In-depth sessions will included types of formal logic, how to frame different logical expressions, how to use different ontological "partitions", ontology design patterns, design of operational ontologies for inference processing applications and so on. There was also a less formal component in which we brainstormed a number of possible novel applications that are made possible by the use of this kind of ontology.
If you have heard about the "Semantic Web", or if you have had to deal with issues of common meaning across disparate data sources, there will have been something in this for you. Note that this was intended to be complementary to more technically-focused ontology training. The focus here was to take the work being done in the "Applied Ontology" academic community and explore how we can use it in solving day to day business problems.
We hope to repeat and extend this in future years - please stay tuned or mail us to indicate your interest. The Summer Camp material can also be presented within a client firm, either in-house or as an off-site boot camp.
The immediate outcome of the Summer Camp was the creation of a new and growing community of practice, called the Semantic Shed. Associated with this is a growing list of freelance consultants and small firms who have contributed to the methodology and are able to deliver results based on this thinking. We have gone on to hold two further summer camps in 2017 and 2018 with a fourth planned in California in summer 2019, as well as a number of 'Mini-Sheds' in Virginia, Italy, Canada and the Netherlands.
In October 2018 we booked a house in Annandale, Virginia for a week of in-depth study, methodology development and hands-on practise with ontology tools. In these sessions we drew together the components of the ontology development framework we had started to build in Wales, with additional details from our Mini-Shed in Bolzano, Italy, to describe the development lifecycle for ontologies including both concept-focused reference ontologies and application ontology development.
We also reviewed some lessons learned on upper or top-level ontologies from the 2017 Summer Institute some of us had attended in Toronto earlier in the year, put on by the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA) and the weekend Mini-Shed on Upper Ontologies that followed this.
The week's activities also included hands-on experience with a new tool for ontology visualization.
In the summer of 2018 the Semantic Shed headed for a country house in the Cantabrian village of Limpias, near Bilbao for another week of ontology methodology development. The focus this time was on the development of a set of core foundational concepts for a common business concept ontology. We were also joined remotely by leading academics in the field, and were able to assemble the basics of a business ontology for transaction and accounting concepts.
This summer saw us back in North America, this time sharing a house in the city of Montreal, Quebec. We spent time on our methodology for extracting operational ontologies and data models from reference or concept ontologies, based on the 'context' of the proposed application. We also continue to progress with the work on the shared top level and mid level ontology, building on the REA ontology and the work we did with this in Spain, and on the early conceptual material in FIBO. We also made a start to formalizing the arrangements for membership of this Semantic Shed community, by way of a Memorandum of Understanding.
This work also continues during our informal series of 'Mini-Shed' events, usually a day or two co-located with OMG meeetings or other events that members of the Shed community are attending.
In this webinar in 2015, Mike Bennett set out the conceptual ontology modeling principles which are such a central part of how Hypercube delivers.
A complete recording of the webinar is available here.
or downloadable as a ZIP File here.
Slides are available here or on Slideshare.
We may re-run this webinar again in the near future - let us know if you are interested.