Ontological Engineering Fall 2026

PHI 604: Ontological Engineering

University at Buffalo, Fall 2026

Course Description

This graduate course trains students to build semantically interoperable systems using formal ontologies, the Semantic Web stack, automated reasoning, validation tools, and ontology-based machine learning workflows.

The course combines theoretical foundations with practical ontology engineering. Students learn to model, query, validate, debug, and extend ontologies while developing complete semantic data pipelines.

Topics

Ontology engineering methodology
Competency questions and ontology design patterns
Basic Formal Ontology
RDF, RDFS, OWL, and Linked Data
SPARQL
OWL reasoning and reasoners
ROBOT
SHACL validation
Ontology mappings
Semantic data pipelines
Ontology-based machine learning
Embeddings and semantic similarity
Large language models in ontology engineering
Ontology debugging and quality assurance

Course Materials

Course materials, lectures, exercises, and project information are available through the Ontology Tradecraft GitHub repository.