Results of Spring 2026 team projects
From PHI 616: Introduction to Basic Formal Ontology
Spring Semester 2026
1. A Re-examination of the BFO Expert Coding Challenge
- In their paper “Measuring expert performance at manually classifying domain entities under upper ontology classes” (10.1016/j.websem.2018.08.004) Stevens, et al.) pointed to the low (51%) agreement score achieved by subjects tasked with matching descriptions to BFO terms. Our students identified flaws in Stevens’ methodology which they present in a new paper (still in preparation).
2. BFO as a standard for C3O cybersecurity
- Students modelled the Common Core Cyber Ontology using the carrier, content, and signal distinction (IBE, ICE, IQE) to reason about attacks and defences. They also created a ‘Coffee Cup Ontology’ analogy to introduce the core BFO categories to cybersecurity practitioners. https://youtu.be/Pjrt_6-o9Jw?si=x7AhZzb2oxh2l1LG
3. BFO game
- Students Designed a 2 to 4 player game on a 7x7 board where players build valid (subject, object property, object) triples from a curated ‘daily life’ subset of BFO, scoring a point per tile used in a valid triple. They ran a full four-round playtest on Tabletopia with escalating placement rules. They also identified next steps, including a physical edition of the game and wider field testing.
4. “BFO: Your New BFF”
- This is a podcast at
It includes six public episodes (20 to 46 minutes each) introducing ontology and interviewing BFO practitioners, hosted on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u4ycBoFM-Q&list=PLFBF7RdTCEPz7FFiO_WPr-ye5J3fVeMmj. Guests included Elena Milivinti on waste ontology, Jeremy Ravenel, Sean Tucker, and Ryan Riccucci.
5. “Promotional videos” built using two pipelines: a hybrid of recorded human voice with Meta AI animation, and a fully AI TikTok short, built in Revid.ai. See
6. “Evaluation of NIEM (the National Information Exchange Model) against BFO with special reference to the issue of counter-UAS interoperability”
- Assessed the NIEM 6.0 reference model (19,008 properties, 10,207 types, 50-plus namespaces) against BFO plus CCO for air-domain data integration, mapped onto the Levels of Conceptual Interoperability Model.
Found four conflicting definitions of “Event” in NIEM 6.0, two of them conflating continuant and occurrent inside a single type, alongside structural issues: augmentation-point extension hooks at 12.2% of properties, TextType collapse to strings at 13.2%, 989 circular definitions, and 172 cross-namespace drifts. Argued BFO and CCO supply categorial distinctions NIEM's schema cannot express, citing federal adoption (DoD, ODNI, CDAO via DIOWG 2024) and CBP's Border Security Ontology.
7. “Metabolic Inflexibility Ontology”
- Built a BFO-aligned ontology anchoring metabolic inflexibility as a Disposition (rejecting Process, Quality, Function, and Material Entity), realised in impaired fuel-switching and aligned to HPO, NCIT, and UBERON.
Structured a five-level taxonomy from phenotype down to molecule, with six object properties and a worked traversal from the top class to CPT1A.
8: “Applying BFO and FoodOn to an enterprise Digital Asset Management schema”
- Audited a global food company's DAM and found its ‘Asset Type’ field conflating at least five ontological categories. Proposed a six-layer BFO-aligned architecture separating material entity, content, file, role, quality, and process, with FoodOn supplying the real-world food entities.
