Tutorial on Basic Formal Ontology

From NCOR Wiki
Jump to navigationJump to search

1: Overview

Video
Slides
What BFO is used for
BFO is an upper-level ontology
Ontological realism: an evidence-based strategy for ontology development
Starting point for downward population
Annotation of scientific and administrative data
Part storehouse of lessons learned, part QWERTY keyboard
Basis for common training
Works best under the hood
Brief history of BFO
Pre-History
Aristotle's Ontological Square
Edmund Husserl
Truthmakers
The Naive Physics Manifesto
Mereotopology
The Gene Ontology and the Foundational Model of Anatomy
BFO's competitors
DOLCE
SUMO
CYC
What BFO, DOLCE, SUMO, CYC have in common
Arguments in favor of using BFO
Important users of BFO
OBO Foundry
NIF Standard
OBI
IDO Consortium
Plant Ontology
Universal Core Semantic Layer
How BFO is constructed and maintained
Conservative evolution
Simplicity (two levels; no qualities of qualities)
Strict formality (no overlap with domain ontologies)
Asserted monohierarchy and inferred polyhierarchy
Truthmaker
Non-multiplicative (the statue is the portion of clay during the time when the latter has a certain role)
Perspectivalism
No reductionism, no phenomenalism
No 'context'
No meanings, fictions, non-existents
The Semiotic Triangle
No 'possible worlds'
No abstracta
How to deal with thoughts, beliefs, information artifacts
Overview of BFO 1.0
Instances and universals
Continuants and occurrents
Dependent entities and independent entities
PATO qualities
Different kinds of relations
Symmetry, asymmetry and inverses
The all-some rule
What to do with probabilistic and other some-some relations?
Realizables
Roles
Dispositions and the treatment of modality
Functions
Added in BFO 1.1
Generically and specifically dependent continuants, concretizations, and relations of dependence
Information entities

2: Continuant Entities

Video
Slides
Boundaries, sites and spatial regions
Material entities occupy spatial regions
Temporal instants and temporal intervals
Spatial boundaries and spatial volumes
Time, space and coordinate frames
Material and immaterial entities
Objects, fiat object parts and object aggregates
Three kinds of objects
Organisms
Solid portions of matter
Engineered artifacts
A problem case: Cell adhesion
Fiat objects reflect granular partitions
Object aggregates reflect granular partitions
Organisms and molecules
Object aggregates can change their members over time
Rigid and non-rigid universals
Determinates and determinables
Role universals are rigid universals

3. Process Profiles

Video
Slides
Process profiles as targets of process measurements
Temperature charts
Cognitive selection
The Wiggers diagram
Quality process profiles
Color
Hue, saturation and brightness
Polyphonic music
Determinables and determinates
Rate process profiles
Heart rate
Speed
Relative Process profiles
Process profiles and time-series graphs
Truthmakers for graphs

4. Granular Partitions

Video
Slides
Manipulating partitions
Object partitions
Quality partitions
Color
Map layers
Process partitions
Map-based partitions of occurrent reality and the fiat entities they create
Weather
Napoleon's march to Moscow
From photography to film
Persistence in time
Partition sequences
Tossing a coin
Chess
Flying from Vienna to New York
Molecular pathways
Defining 'process profile'
Focusing on the cello part when you listen to a string quartet
Granular partitions and the Davidsonian theory of events

Important links

Principal BFO website
BFO users
BFO on github
BFO book

A shorter summary of the above material is presented here:

BFO 2.0 Shorter Version Part One
BFO 2.0 Shorter Version Part Two