Teaching ontology engineering at Uni de la Habana in April

I mentioned in an earlier post about Informatica 2009 that the Cuban Government has decided to support the knowledge society with respect to informatics; read, e.g., the transcript of the speech by Commander of the Revolution and Minister of Informatics and Communications Ramiro Valdés Menéndez. Clearly, this includes ontologies and, to a greater or lesser extent, the Semantic Web, and the desire to develop local capacities in this area. To make a long story short, it took a while to find the time, choose the topics, and figure out the bureaucratic aspects, but—and with many thanks due to Rafael Oliva Santos’ efforts on the Cuban side of the organisation—finally I’ll be on my way to Cuba this Sunday to teach a course on ontology engineering at the Universidad de la Habana from 5 to 16 April.

For the curious among you, I have put the handouts of the course slides together into one pdf. They are not meant as a summary, but instead intended to give some structure in the flow of information and a place for some examples so that students are not completely absorbed with writing down what I’ll chalk up on the board (and so that I do not spend too much time on trying to make pretty slides). Nevertheless, it does give an idea about the topics that will pass the revue in the limited time, such as top-down and bottom-up ontology development, differences between conceptual models and ontologies, methods, ontology design parameters and their interactions, methodologies, and OWL (yes, some sections of the SWT course are reused and extended with more ontology engineering). In addition, there is an associated lab and a mini-project to get hands-on experience in ontology engineering.

The internet connection being what it is in Cuba, I will only sporadically check the blog and emails during my stay until the end of April 2010 (and I do hope this blog post will not be spammed as much as the previous ones about Cuba).

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