Building ontologies from the ground up invited talk by Professor Mark Musen (Stanford Medical Informatics) on 12/09/2004

* Agenda Professor Mark A. Musen will be giving a talk entitled: andquot;Building ontologies from the ground upandquot; * Date Thursday, Dec. 9, 2004 * ONTOLOG forum Wiki page details http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2004_12_09 * Abstract Building electronic ontologies no longer is exclusively the province of philosophers or even that of computer scientists. Professionals of all kinds increasingly recognize the importance of creating explicit, formal models of the activities and objects with which they deal in their work and of the data that drive their decision making. In business, science, and government, there are burgeoning grassroots efforts to codify human knowledge fur purposes of document retrieval, data analysis, and decision support. These pragmatic efforts are enormously important to the professional communities from which they derive. They do not always adhere to standard conventions for domain modeling or knowledge representation, however. In this talk, I will discuss certain grass-roots efforts to build ontologies and the effects that these efforts have had on their professional communities. There are obvious growing pains as workers most concerned about content knowledge learn to formalize that knowledge in a way that can facilitate automated information management and decision making. Professional societies, government agencies, and educational institutions can be enormously beneficial in providing resources to bolster these activities and to ensure that resulting ontologies are sound and maximally reusable. The advent of andquot;the information societyandquot; requires the codification and dissemination of human knowledge in electronic form. The people who work closest to that knowledge are already taking major strides to build the necessary ontologies and knowledge resources.