The Daily Bulletin Archive

Ron Rudnicki, senior research scientist at CUBRC Inc., will present a Mathematics Department lecture titled "Applied Ontology and Its Uses" on Friday, April 18, at 3:00 p.m. in Ketchum Hall 113.

Applied ontologies are information artifacts that are becoming increasingly common features of data integration projects and knowledge-based information systems. The presentation will begin with an overview of the structure and content of ontologies and how insights from philosophical ontology have been used to produce best practices in their construction. Following this will be a description of how ontologies are made machine processable through serialization in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The presentation will conclude with a description and demonstration of supporting technologies such as the SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) and examples of ontologically backed knowledge bases such as those found on the NCBO Bioportal and DBPedia. The content of the presentation will be accessible to a general audience.

Rudnicki specializes in ontology engineering and semantic web technologies. He has developed ontologies in the domains of biometrics, command and control, and human activity. Before CUBRC, he worked at Gartner constructing a data warehouse for the IT Benchmarking division. He holds undergraduate degrees in philosophy and mathematics, and a master’s degree in philosophy from the University at Buffalo.