Basic Formal Ontology

Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a top-level ontology developed by Barry Smith and his associates for the purposes of promoting interoperability among domain ontologies built in its terms through a process of downward population.[1] A guide to building BFO-conformant domain ontologies was published by MIT Press in 2015.[2] The standard "Information technology — Top-level ontologies (TLO) — Part 2: Basic Formal Ontology (BFO)". ISO/IEC 21838-2. is currently under development.

The structure of BFO is based on a division of entities into two disjoint categories of continuant and occurrent, the former comprehending for example objects and spatial regions, the latter comprehending processes conceived as extended through (or as spanning) time. BFO thereby seeks to consolidate both time and space within a single framework.

Applications

BFO has been adopted as a foundational ontology by over 300 ontology projects,[3] principally in the areas of biomedical ontology and security and defense (intelligence) ontology.[1] An example application of BFO can be seen in the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) and in the Open Biomedical Ontologies Foundry.

See also

• Formal ontology
• Upper ontology

References

1. "Home". Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). Retrieved 20 December 2017.
2. Arp, Robert; Smith, Barry; Spear, Andrew D. (2015). Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-52781-1.
3. "Users". Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). Retrieved 10 September 2018.

Further reading

• Bittner, Thomas; Donnelly, Maureen; Smith, Barry (2009). "A Spatio-Temporal Ontology for Geographic Information Integration" (PDF). International Journal for Geographical Information Science. 23 (6): 765–798. doi:10.1080/13658810701776767. S2CID 5055085.
• Grenon, P.; Smith, B. (2004). "SNAP and SPAN: Towards Dynamic Spatial Ontology" (PDF). Spatial Cognition and Computation. 4 (1): 69–103. doi:10.1207/s15427633scc0401_5. S2CID 14469822.
• Jansen, Ludger (October 2007). "Tendencies and other Realizables in Medical Information Sciences" (PDF). The Monist. 90 (4): 534–554. doi:10.5840/monist200790436.
• Munn, Katherine; Smith, Barry, eds. (2013). Applied Ontology: An Introduction. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 9783110324860.
• Neuhaus, Fabian; Grenon, Pierre; Smith, Barry (2004). "A Formal Theory of Substances, Qualities, and Universals" (PDF). In Varzi, Achille C.; Vieu, Laure (eds.). Formal Ontology in Information Systems: Proceedings of the Third International Conference (FOIS-2004). Frontiers in artificial intelligence and applications. IOS Press. pp. 49–59. ISBN 1586034685. ISSN 0922-6389.
• Schneider, Luc (2010). "Revisiting the Ontological Square" (PDF). In Galton, Antony; Mizoguchi, Riichiro (eds.). Formal Ontology in Information Systems: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference (FOIS 2010). Frontiers in artificial intelligence and applications. 209. IOS Press. pp. 73–. ISBN 9781607505341. ISSN 0922-6389.
• Smith, B.; Grenon, P. (2004). "The Cornucopia of Formal-Ontological Relations" (PDF). Dialectica. 58 (3): 79–296. doi:10.1111/j.1746-8361.2004.tb00305.x.
• Smith, Barry; Ceusters, Werner; Klagges, Bert; Köhler, Jacob; Kumar, Anand; Lomax, Jane; Mungall, Chris; Neuhaus, Fabian; Rector, Alan; Rosse, Cornelius (2005). "Relations in Biomedical Ontologies". Genome Biology. 6 (5): R46. doi:10.1186/gb-2005-6-5-r46. PMID 15892874. S2CID 11117072.
• Smith, B.; Ceusters, W. (2010). "Ontological Realism as a Methodology for Coordinated Evolution of Scientific Ontologies"". Applied Ontology. 5 (3–4): 139–188. doi:10.3233/AO-2010-0079. PMC 3104413. PMID 21637730.

External links

• Basic Formal Ontology (BFO)
• Basic Formal Ontology 2.0
• Smith, Barry (15 February 2018). Ontology for Systems Engineering (Short Version).