In computer science, ontologies are used to provide a common vocabulary for a domain of interest together with descriptions of the meaning of terms built from the vocabulary and relationships between them. Ontologies in this sense are increasingly used in knowledge management systems, medical and bio-informatics are set to play a key role in the semantic web and grid. Modern ontologies may contain hundreds of thousands of term definitions and are, therefore, often represented in a machine readable form. In order to be computer-accessible, modern ontologies are formulated in a logic-based ontology language.

In this course we consider logical ontology languages, used to design and maintain ontologies, and a number of ontology reasoning problems including ontology classification, instance checking, and knowledge base querying. We also introduce design and maintenance methodologies and consider applications.