For the last seven years I have worked developing and implementing ontologies in industry, government and university sectors. Currently, I am Senior Ontologist at Computer Task Group (CTG), where I work primarily on applying semantic technologies to healthcare and defense related projects. My initial interest in applied ontology began during a two year stint (2002-2004) as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Sciences (IFOMIS) in Leipzig, Germany (now located in Saarbrucken, Germany). My primary research at IFOMIS applied formal-ontological principles to evaluate health information models such as the Health Level Seven (HL7) Reference Information Model.

In 2005, I received my PhD in Philosophy from the University at Buffalo. In my dissertation, entitled Corporate Being: A Study in Realist Ontology, I advanced the position that corporate entities have an existence above and beyond their members and specified the mechanisms by which such entities are created and sustained in social reality. After receiving my PhD, I spent a year at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD in the Postdoctoral Research Program at the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications (a research division of the U.S. National Library of Medicine).

Experience

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Apr 2008 - Present

 Sr. Ontologist, Computer Task Group, Buffalo, NY

Sep 2006 - Apr 2008

 Sr. Ontologist, Ontology Works, Baltimore, MD

Sep 2005 - Aug 2006

 NLM Medical Informatics Postdoctoral Fellow, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD

Oct 2002 - Aug 2004

 Research Fellow, IFOMIS, Leipzig, Germany

Education

2005

PhD, in Philosophy, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY

1999

BA, in Philosophy and German, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay, Green Bay, WI

Papers

12.Barry Smith, Lowell Vizenor and James Schoening. Universal Core Semantic Layer. Proceedings of Ontology for the Intelligence Community, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, October 2009, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 555.
11.Vizenor L, Bodenreider O and McCray A. Auditing Associative Relations across Two Knowledge Sources. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 2009;42(3):426-439
10.Grady N, Vizenor L, Marin J, and Peitersen L. Bio-surveillance Event Models, Open Source Intelligence, and the Semantic Web. Biosurveillance and Biosecurity (2008): 22-31.
9.Grady N, Jones J, Vizenor L et al. Data Integration and Analytics within the National Bio-Surveillance Integration System. Advances in Disease Surveillance 2007; 4:94.
8.Little E and Vizenor L. Principles for the Development of Upper Ontologies in Higher-level Information Fusion Applications. In B. Bennett and C. Fellbaum, editors, Proceedings of the fourth International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2006): 65-76.
7.Vizenor L, Bodenreider O, Peters L, McCray AT. Enhancing biomedical ontologies through alignment of semantic relationships: Exploratory approaches. AMIA Annu Symp Proc 2006:804-808.
6.Vizenor L, Bodenreider O. Using dependence relations in MeSH as a framework for the analysis of disease information in Medline. Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Semantic Mining in Biomedicine (SMBM-2006) 2006:76-83.
5.Vizenor L. Actions in Health Care Organizations: an Ontological Analysis. Stud Health Technol Inform. 2004; 107(2): 1403-1407.
4.Vizenor L and Smith B. Speech Acts and Medical Records: The Ontological Nexus. Presented at EuroMISE, Prague, April 12-15, 2004.
3.Vizenor L, Smith B, and Ceusters W. Foundation for the Electronic Health Record: An Ontological Analysis of the HL7’s Reference Information Model (Draft 2004)
2.translation of: Sandbothe M. The Pragmatic Twist of the Linguistic Turn (die pragmatische Wende des Linguistic Turn) in:The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy: Contemporary Engagements between Analytic and Continental Thought, William Eggington & Mike Sandbothe (eds.) New York, SUNY, 2004: pp. 67-92.
1.Vizenor L, Smith B. Speech Acts, Documents, and Medical Phenomena: An Investigation in the Ontology of Organizations. Technology and Health Care 2003; 11(5): 362-363.