BFO-Intro

PHI 637 Introduction to Basic Formal Ontology

Dr. Barry Smith

ONLINE, HYBRID, TWO CREDIT COURSE

This course will present an introduction to Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), which is a widely used top-level ontology, approved in 2021 as international standard (ISO/IEC 21838-2).

1. January 21
2. January 28
3. February 4
4. February 11
5. February 18

February 25 March 4 March 11 March 18 Spring recess March 25 April 1 April 8 April 15 April 22 April 29 May 5

Material for the course will be based on the following BFO tutorials, supplemented by documentation of more recent developments:

• 2015 Tutorials and Earlier Material

• 2019 Tutorial

• 2025 and Other Recent Tutorials

Revised versions of this tutorial material will be divided into 14 single-hour lectures which will be made available asynchronously. The lectures will form the basis for synchronous weekly working sessions tentatively scheduled for Wednesdays at 7-8pm. Students will be graded on the basis of their contributions to these working sessions, which will be designed to lead to the creation of online content, summarizing aspects of BFO and of how BFO is used, that is suitable for distribution to a wider audience.

Exam: The final synchronous session

Issues to be addressed include:

Reviews of BFO coding using LLMs

Formulating a response to BFO Expert Coding Challenge - Citations

Background reading:

ISO standard

Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology (MIT Press, 2015)