Tutorial on Basic Formal Ontology
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1: Overview
- 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
- Pre-History
- What BFO is used for
- 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
- BFO's competitors
- 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
- Overview of BFO 1.0
2: Continuant Entities
- 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
- Three kinds of objects
- 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
- Boundaries, sites and spatial regions
3. Process Profiles
- 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
- Process profiles as targets of process measurements
4. Granular Partitions
- 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
- Map-based partitions of occurrent reality and the fiat entities they create
- From photography to film
- Persistence in time
- Partition sequences
- Tossing a coin
- Chess
- Flying from Vienna to New York
- Molecular pathways
- Partition sequences
- 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
A shorter summary of the above material is presented here:
