Basic Formal Ontology 2.0: Tutorial at ICBO/FOIS

Venue: Medical University of Graz, Austria

Date: July 25, 2012, afternoon

Abstract

Basic Formal Ontology 2.0 will be released in draft form for public comment on March 1, 2012. We anticipate that a definitive release will be agreed upon by March 31, 2012. Given the large number of users of the existing BFO 1.1, and given the substantial interest in this new release, there is a need for an event at which the release can be described in its definitive form by means of a tutorial, which will consist of six parts:

1. General introduction to BFO

2. New features of BFO 2.0, especially the ontology of process profiles

3. BFO 2.0 FOL

4. BFO 2.0 OWL

5. Use of BFO 2.0 in annotations

6. Use of BFO 2.0 in guaranteeing interoperability of domain ontologies created through downward population

Rationale

BFO is currently being used by over 100 ontology-based research projects in biomedical informatics and increasingly in other fields. The new version fills a number of critical gaps in BFO 1.0 and provides enhanced support for logical reasoning. The tutorial will serve both to introduce new users to BFO and also to inform existing users of the changes made in version 2.0.

Audience and format

The tutorial will be targeted to a general audience; it will serve to introduce BFO to new users, but also provide technical details of the current version of BFO that will be presented in a form that will be of interest to advanced users. Attendees will acquire basic knowledge of BFO and of its use as top-level ontology in multiple ontology development projects in a variety of fields. They will learn about the most recent developments in the ontology and acquire basic knowledge of the new formalizations of BFO in first-order logic and in OWL.

Faculty

Barry Smith, National Center for Ontological Research, University at Buffalo, 126 Park Hall, Buffalo, NY, USA

Alan Ruttenberg, Clinical and Translational Data Exchange, University at Buffalo, NY, USA