Basic Formal Ontology 2015
Basic Formal Ontology (BFO)
Tutorial organized in conjunction with the International Conference on Biomedical Ontology, Lisbon, 2015
Faculty: Barry Smith, Department of Philosophy, University at Buffalo. Email: phismith@buffalo.edu
'Abstract
- The tutorial will fall into two parts.
- Part 1 is for beginners, and provides a simple introduction to the
rationale and principles underlying BFO, a brief guide to the history of the ontology, of its relations to other candidate upper ontologies, and of its principal applications, culminating in some examples of how BFO is used to initiate ontology development. The introduction to BFO described at http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/bfo-book.pdf will be released in advance of the meeting.
- Part 2 will provide a guide to the current state of BFO and specifically of
the proposed BFO version 2, and of the state of work along the three parallel tracks of (i) English-language specification, (ii) OWL and (iii) FOL formalization. 2.0 will be released in draft form for public comment in advance of the tutorial. It will also describe how BFO 2.0 is being used in current work on the Information Artifact Ontology (IAO).
Rationale Given that BFO is now used as the top-level architecture for over 130 ontologies in the biological and biomedical domains I believe that there is considerable demand for a training event of this sort. I also believe that the large user forums of BFO and IAO will enhance advertising for the ICBO conference as a whole. The publication of the MIT Press book on BFO in spring 2015 will also contribute to interest in the topic of this tutorial.
