The BFO Practitioner Certificate introduces students to the fundamentals of modeling data with the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), a top-level architecture used by over 700 ontology and knowledge graph projects across the world. Students gain hands-on modeling experiences, working with subject-matter experts on active open-source projects leveraging BFO. Additionally, students will learn the philosophical and practical motivations for the distinctions drawn in BFO. This certificate course covers necessary building blocks for mastering differences and similarities across alternative top-level ontology architectures as well as for leveraging open-source ontologies to model specific domains, such as biomedicine, cyber security, climate change, and immigration, among many others.

• Module 1
  • Motivations for Basic Formal Ontology
• Module 2
  • Methodological Convictions of BFO
• Module 3
  • Theory of BFO 3a
  • Theory of BFO 3b
  • Theory of BFO 3c
  • Theory of BFO 3d
• Module 4
  • Logic of BFO Definitions

• Intelligence Analysis and Ontology Engineering
• Logic for Ontologists

The Ontology Engineer Certificate introduces students to the fundamentals of ontology engineering, focused on the creation, updating, maintaining, and validating of ontologies and knowledge graphs in contemporary system architectures. This course provides students hands-on training to master the semantic web stack, equipping students with the competency needed to integrate and curate ontologies effectively. This certificate serves as a stepping stone for certificates covering specialized topics such as optimized information extraction, semantic web devOps best practices, description logic, and cybersecurity related to the semantic web.

• Module 1
  • History of and Motivation for the Semantic Web
• Module 2
  • The Web Ontology Language
• Module 3
  • Knowledge Extraction Techniques
• Module 4
  • Cyber Security in the Semantic Web