NIF Webinar - February 9, 2010 / Topic: Defined versus Asserted Classes

The Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) hosts Webinar series on topics focused on collaborating with NIF, getting involved in building the NIF vocabulary, using NIF portal resources, as well as other appropriate NIF topics.

Our next NIF Webinar is scheduled for February 9th, 2010. Please join Dr. Maryann Martone, Principal Investigator of the NIF Project, and Fahim Imam, Ontology Engineer from UC San Diego,  for an informative session on the NIF Standard Ontology. Details follow.

Date and Time: Tuesday, February 9, 2010 • 11:00-12:00 PST
Topic: Defined versus Asserted Classes:  Working with the NIF OWL Ontologies
Presenters: Dr. Maryann Martone and Fahim Imam
URL: http://connect.neuinfo.org/webinar
Dial-In (toll-free): 866-740-1260
Access Code: 8220739

The NIF project has established a set of modular ontologies covering many of the major domains of relevance to neuroscience, the NIF Standard Ontology (NIFSTD).  This Webinar will focus on NIF’s approach to the asserted vs inferred hierarchy in the NIFSTD ontology and how NIF builds up more complicated relationships among NIF modules while keeping modularity intact.  When it comes to asserted hierarchy of classes, NIFSTD ontologies took the single inheritance principle which is also an important OBO foundry recommendation.  This principle allows us to have the classes that are univocal and unambiguous within the core NIFSTD modules. We believe that this principle is often misunderstood to mean that you can only have a single hierarchy in your ontology.  However, through the use of logical definitions with necessary and sufficient conditions, multiple parents can be inferred using automated reasoning.  This saves a great deal of manual labor and provides a logical reason as to how that class may exist in different hierarchies.  In this Webinar, we will provide examples including the NIF's inferred hierarchy of neurons by neurotransmitter and by soma location.

We look forward to seeing you there.