BFO 2020

ISO/IEC 21838-1 Top-Level Ontologies (TLO) (

this is part 1 of a multipart standard; it specifies the requirements for being a top-level ontology

it was published by ISO in August 2021, and is available at https://www.iso.org/standard/71954.html

for those working on standards it is freely available at this ISO site

ISO/IEC 21838-2 Basic Formal Ontology (BFO)

this is part 2 of the standard; it standardizes BFO as a top-level ontology conforming to Part 1

it was published by ISO in November 2021, and is available at

https://www.iso.org/standard/74572.html

This part of the standard, too, will be freely available for those working on standards at the same ISO site.

The entire formal content of BFO-2020 is available here:

https://standards.iso.org/iso-iec/21838/-2/ed-1/en/

This includes:

bfo-2020-terms.xlsx (terms and relational expressions with definitions and examples)

bfo-2020-iris.xlsx (table of IRIs for all classes and relations in BFO-2020-CL, the Common Logic axiomatization of BFO, and including all classes and relations in BFO-ISO-OWL)

bfo-2020-relations-table.xlsx (table of all relations in BFO-2020-CL, including all inverses, reverses*, and all binary variants used in BFO-2020-OWL)

The owl folder includes

bfo-2020.owl – OWL in rdf/xml format

bfo-2020.ofn – OWL in functional syntax

bfo-2020-labeled.ofn – OWL in functional syntax with labels instead of IRIs

bfo-2020-without-some-all-times.owl – as for 5. but without the binaryized relations

The common-logic folder provides the complete set of modules in the CL formalization of BFO-2020 together with

temporalized-relations.cl, which contains CL definitions of the binary at-all-times/some-time relations used in bfo-2020-owl.

The pdf folder provides the complete set of modules in the CL axiomatization of BFO-ISO in traditional first-order logic (FOL) syntax.

The prover9 folder provides the same set of modules in prover 9 format, together with, together with

temporalized-relations.p9, which provdes the content of temporalized-relations.cl in prover9 format

The model folder provides three versions of the model used to prove consistency of the CL formalization, in prover 9, CLIF, and clausetester formats respectivly.

The most current version of these files will be at https://github.com/BFO-ontology/BFO-2020

[*] The concept of reverse relation is only relevant for at-all-time relations. See reverse-vs-inverse for an explanation.

For questions contact aruttenberg@gmail.com