Logic: Systems, Semantics, and Models - 605.624

Traditionally, logic is the study of correct reasoning. In the last few decades, logic has become increasingly important to knowledge representation — a subfield of artificial intelligence concerned with developing representations of the world (often called ontologies) that aid computers in understanding and making sense of data. This course will promote both a theoretical and practical understanding of logic as a stepping stone for working in contemporary knowledge representation. We will begin with a review of categorical, propositional, and predicate logic. We will then survey modal logics, which include systems that represent necessity and probability, as well as other systems that represent time, and moral notions such as obligation and permissibility. The second half of the course will then introduce the semantic web and ontology engineering. Students will explore the top-level ontology Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and gain familiarity using mereological and temporal relations. In addition, students will create ontologies in the web ontology language (OWL2) and use the language SPARQL to query knowledge graphs. Students will have the option of writing either a research paper or creating an ontology in OWL with slides as part of a final project.