Basic Formal Ontology Summit Meeting/abstracts

Day 1: Future of Basic Formal Ontology

Keynotes

• Werner Ceusters: The Axiomatization of BFO 2020: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

The Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is undoubtedly the most frequently cited upper ontology in the biomedical literature. It is also claimed to be used as the foundation for many biomedical application ontologies. However, a closer look at these ontologies makes it clear that many of them deviate considerably from even the most basic principles upon which the BFO is built. Reasons can be derived from published papers that describe these ontologies. One reason is the popularity of OWL and tools such as Protégé of which the limits are poorly understood. A second one is the loss of semantics that arises from representing the BFO exclusively by means of binary relations, thus ignoring certain principles underlying the BFO, notably the requirement for temporal indexing in relations involving continuants. Although the importance of these and other principles has been stressed in many papers and presentations by BFO authors, education therein seems to be lacking or is at least inadequate.

The recent axiomatization of the BFO in First Order Logic (FOL) might offer an opportunity to remediate the situation. Soon after its public availability in September 2021, I started to use the BFO’s CLIF files in my ontology and referent tracking courses to explain BFO’s foundational principles. For some assignments, students were expected to write axioms for terms and relations they intended to include in the ontologies they were developing as part of their MSc or PhD thesis. I also embarked on a still ongoing project to develop a set of tools to make axiom-based ontology design easier for students lacking a solid background in formal logic and/or computer science. It is therefore encouraging to see that others are following similar paths and, for example, have shown that automatic reasoning with FOL annotations can be used to detect previously unnoticed errors in simple OWL-based classifications.

In this talk, I will focus on some of my and my students’ experiences with the use and development of a parser/generator for BFO2020-style CLIF axioms, and a reasoner for satisfiability testing of both axiomatized ontologies and instance data expressed in their terms. I will discuss how these experiences – good ones (yeah, temporal reasoning becomes possible!), bad ones (is there a bug in the reasoner or are temporal regions not what I thought them to be?), and ugly ones (is the resulting model one that we intended?) – might be used to improve the documentation of the BFO, to make axioms more actionable and informative while still logically equivalent and to provide a smoother path to axiomatization of related ontologies such as the Ontology of General Medical Science, the Information Artifact Ontology and the Ontology of Biomedical Investigations.

Roundtable

• The Future of BFO: What Needs to be Changed? (Chair - John Beverley)

Workshops

• BFO-ISO (Chair - Barry Smith)

• BFO-2020 Subgroup (Chair - Amelia Kahn)

Day 2: Applications of Basic Formal Ontology

Keynote

• Janna Hastings, Field Reports from Using BFO in Scientific Ontologies

Workshops

• Biomedical Applications of BFO (Chair - TBD)

• Applications of BFO in Industry (Chair - John Beverley)

• "The Industrial Ontologies Foundry", TBD
• "Fandaws and BFO", Aaron Damiano
• "OccO: The Occupation Ontology" John Beverley, Yongqun "Oliver" He, Sam Smith, et al.

Though there is widespread agreement on the importance of representing occupational data, taxonomy standards that exist - e.g. ILO ISCO, EU ESCO, US BLS SOC - are not interoperable, despite covering roughly the same domain. Ontologies - controlled vocabularies comprised of classes arranged in a hierarchy and formal relationships among them - have for many years been deployed to promote interoperability among disparate datasets. With this in mind, and with the three standards referenced above in purview, we have developed the Occupation Ontology (OccO), whose scope is specific to the domain of occupations, titles, relevant skills and capacities. Though currently focused on English language occupation standards, next steps include extending coverage of OccO to ISCO and ESCO, and indeed our progress has been enhanced by dialogue with representatives of the latter. As expansions of coverage continue, moreover, the OccO development team will maintain conformance to the ISO specified upper-level Basic Formal Ontology, as well as to the principles of the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology Foundry, as such conformance results in interoperability among a wide range of existing conformant ontologies.

• "Ontologies for Sustainability: Theoretical Challenges", Giorgio Ubbiali, Nicolas Piras, Matthew Lange, Andrea Borghini

To date, no study has reviewed the available ontologies with regard to the notion of sustainability and the connected theoretical challenges. This paper aims to fill this gap. First, in section 1, we outline the three major challenges associated with the notion of sustainability: 1) the polysemy of the term, 2) the relationship between sustainability and sustainable development, and 3) the complexity of the topics covered by this notion. Then, in section 2, we offer a review of the main accomplishments, achieved so far by ontologies, to meet these theoretical challenges. In this assessment, we devote special attention to the Sustainable Development Goals Interface Ontology (SDGIO). SDGIO is the only available ontology that focuses on sustainability and employs the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as the upper-level ontology. Since, within the OBO Foundry, all ontologies utilize BFO, this facilitates sharing and integrating terms systematically, allowing the establishment of richer accounts of notions as challenging as sustainability. We conclude by considering some potential trajectories to improve SDGIO and further develop a family of sustainability ontologies, which employ BFO as the reference upper-level ontology.

• Economics and Accounting Ontology (Chairs - Bill McCarthy and Graham Gal)

• "Towards an Ontology of Inflation", Jonathan Vajda

What is price inflation in an economy? I argue that price inflation is a change of disposition in an aggregate of personal, social agents. Currency inflation is itself one such example of price change for a given medium of exchange. My proposal might seem initially counter-intuitive, since prices are usually thought to be traits of things and services rather than agents. First, I give a service-centric account of commercial exchanges. Second, I give a dispositional account of price. Third, I argue that aggregates are the proper ontological elements of price inflation and currency inflation, and that some of the relevant processes (such as joint actions) are realizations of dispositions inhering in aggregates. The intuition that inflation is a property of things and services is, thus, reframed relative to an aggregate of persons. This account purports to advance an inchoate ontology, and does not suggest a complete etiology nor an appraisal of monetary policies that intend to affect inflation. I address several objections, including: that personal social agents (nor aggregates thereof) are neither necessary nor sufficient for economic valuation activities; that inclusion in an aggregate is arbitrary; that attributions of price are properly said of the thing or service; and other objections.

• "Advantages and Challenges of Building a Realism-based Ontology of Finance", Gloria Sansò

Over the last decade, it has become evident that an ontology of finance is needed. Such an ontology would assist in many activities such as assessing systemic risk, detecting financial frauds, and ranking companies based on their financial quality. So far, two major attempts to provide this ontology have been made. The first has led to the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO), whereas the second has led to the Ontology Network in Finance and Economics (OntoFINE). Both these ontologies are concept-based, meaning that they aim to represent concepts of reality instead of the reality itself. Building an ontology of finance BFO- conformant (and thus realism-based) would been an interesting alternative, especially considering that, on several occasions, BFO and its extensions have been proven to be more successful than some concept-based ontologies. On the other hand, financial entities are typically non-physical and, as such, they are a challenge for a framework designed to represent physical things. This point will be discussed by considering some examples including “bond”, “stock”, “price”, and “volatility”.

Day 3: Government Ontology

• Keynote: Ryan Riccucci: For a Government Ontology

Workshops

• Buffalo and Toronto Ontology Group (BoaT) (Chair - Mark Fox)