UB to offer a fully online graduate degree in ontology

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Search any major employment website and you’re likely to find multiple occurrences of the word “ontology.” But subsequently searching for universities that offer degrees in ontology will return a single result: the University at Buffalo.

Beginning with the spring 2026 semester, UB will launch a fully online Master of Science degree (MS) in applied ontology. Housed within the university’s Department of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences, the applied ontology degree will prepare students from around the world for work in this rapidly growing interdisciplinary branch of information science.

Prospective students can apply online in time for admission to the spring semester. Because the program itself is entirely online the course fees are significantly lower than in other programs.

Applied ontologists are in demand across various settings, and graduates of the program will have excellent placement opportunities in the public and private sectors, according to Barry Smith, PhD, SUNY Distinguished Professor and one of the new program’s faculty members.  

“Every government in the world and every intelligence agency needs ontology support,” says Smith, who in 2005 founded the National Center for Ontology Research (NCOR), making Buffalo a world center for research in applied ontology. “Banking, finance, biomedical sciences, the pharmaceutical industry, health care, e‑commerce, and industrial manufacturing all need ontologists. Our MS program will prepare graduates ready to enter these and other fields with the skills and knowledge necessary to manage issues and challenges that ontology can address.”

Students studying applied ontology at UB enter a broad collaborative network of researchers across the world, according to John Beverley, PhD, assistant professor and co-director of NCOR.

“With this MS degree, we aim to more formally standardize applied ontology education not just for UB, but as an example for the ontology community worldwide,” says Beverley.

Ontology is a foundational discipline in philosophy. Aristotle, who established a table of categories for classifying things in the world, can be seen as the world’s first ontologist. But applied ontology came into being only in the 1970s, when large computer systems developed independently, each framing their data in different ways, producing isolated systems which were prevented from working cooperatively with neighboring systems, even those that were built for the same purpose.

Applied ontology seeks to solve this problem – a problem that is only getting worse as the world demands ever greater collaboration between different communities of specialists. It does this by building interoperability, combining the ideas and methods of philosophy to structure terms and definitions.

This interoperability allows otherwise unrelated software systems to work together, organizing and successfully handling massive amounts of data from multiple sources consistently and usefully.  

The iPhone’s Siri app functions using ontologies. The exploitation of Human Genome Project data relied on ontologies. Linked website data, product recommendations and improved online search capabilities are all supported by ontology, and ontology is becoming an important factor in the growth of AI.

Ontology not only promotes interoperability across systems; it can do the same across different disciplines through the development of a common approach to definitions. Ontologies also help align various parts of a single organization by promoting the common understanding of key concepts.

Admission to the applied ontology MS requires an undergraduate degree. Philosophy graduates – trained in logic and argumentation – can apply their discipline to applied ontology, but the program will also lend itself to graduates in computer science, management and a host of other undergraduate programs in STEM fields and the humanities.

The program will offer two sorts of courses in applied ontology to address the different interests and expertise of different groups of students.

The first, which Smith will oversee, is the human side of ontology, which addresses how ontologists work with experts to define strategies to create interoperability. The second, which Beverley will direct, addresses engineering solutions and the software side of ontology where tools are developed to implement and apply ontologies.

The MS degree will include opportunities for hands-on training for students in the form of internship courses, where students gain credit for paid internships.

“Building ontologies requires different kinds of expertise we are ready to deliver to our students. I’m looking forward to getting started,” says Smith.