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
6. February 25
7. March 4
8. March 11
   1. March 18 Spring recess
9. March 25
10. April 1
11. April 8
12. April 15
13. April 22
14. April 29
15. May 5 Synchronous final exam (question/answer) session

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.

Grading

Students will be graded on the basis of

1. Working sessions (50%) 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.
2. Final (50%) synchronous session, based on questions assembled by students over the course of the semester, as follows:
   1. For each asynchronous session each student should prepare exactly one single-sentence question relating to the content of this session. The answer to this question should not be contained in the video content for this session. All questions should be sent in a single email to ifomis@gmail.com on April 30.

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)