Basic Formal Ontology Summit Meeting

Announcement

The 2023 Basic Formal Ontology Summit Meeting will be held May 23rd-25th, 2023. The aims of the meeting are:

1. to bring together researchers who have played an important role in the development and application of BFO, to highlight the practical impact and value of using BFO as a top-level architecture,
2. to identify and work through outstanding issues experienced by users of BFO,
3. to begin the creation of a set of BFO-conformant ontologies in the domain of government policy and data

Subsidiary goals are:

• to showcase real-world examples of incorporation of BFO in development pipelines and their practical impacts
• to promote collaboration across different groups of BFO users
• to share case studies illustrating challenges arising in BFO use, evaluation, interpretation, and revision
• to reveal differences in interpretation of BFO terms and relations, and of associated strategies for using BFO
• to share strategies of evaluation of BFO from different user bases
• to identify and disseminate strategies for improving the quality of BFO-based ontologies

Paper and Workshop Presentations

Those wishing to present a paper at this meeting, including at the workshops mentioned below, should submit a short abstract (~200 words) to John Beverley [1] before February 15th. Confirmation of acceptance will be issued by February 28th. Paper presentations are especially welcome on applications, uses cases, and practical aspects of employing BFO.

Those wishing to present a workshop should contact Barry Smith [2] as soon as possible. Note that we are planning for a meeting consisting entirely of plenary sessions. Hence, the number of workshops will be kept to a minimum.

Keynote Speakers

We are happy to announce four keynote speakers (information will be updated as it becomes available).

Werner Ceusters
Division Chief, Biomedical Ontology
Department of Biomedical Informatics
University at Buffalo, Jacobs School of Medicine & Biomedical Sciences

The first keynote will be given by Werner Ceusters, who will speak on
The Axiomatization of BFO 2020: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Abstract

Alan Ruttenberg
Director of Clinical and Translational Data Exchange
University at Buffalo, School of Dental Medicine

The second keynote will be given by Alan Ruttenberg,
and will be titled Time Matters

Janna Hastings
Assistant Professor of Medical Knowledge and Decision Support, Institute for Implementation Science in Health Care, Faculty of Medicine, University of Zurich
Vice-Director, School of Medicine, University of St. Gallen

The third keynote, by Janna Hastings, will be titled
Field Reports from Using BFO in Scientific Ontologies

Ryan Riccucci
Division Chief, US Border Patrol

Title: TBD

Date

May 23 (Tuesday) - 25 (Thursday), 2023

Venue

University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, 14260

Tentative Schedule

Day 1

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

• Keynote: Alan Ruttenberg, Time Matters

• Workshop: BFO-ISO (Chair - Barry Smith)

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

1. Background and significance
2. Proposals for future revisions and extensions
3. Relationship to other standards

Day 2

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

• Workshop: BFO in Application (Chair - John Beverley)

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

1. Demonstrations of benefits associated with using BFO as a top-level architecture
2. Examples of BFO-based temporal reasoning
3. Comparisons of the use of BFO with other upper-level ontologies

Day 3

• Keynote: Ryan Riccucci, TBD

Organizers

John Beverley (University of Buffalo, Buffalo, NY), [3]

Barry Smith (University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY), [4]