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689Gestalt Theory and Its Reception: An Annotated BibliographyIn Foundations of Gestalt Theory, Philosophia Verlag. pp. 227-478. 1988.The list which follows is intended as a comprehensive bibliographical survey of the wider Gestalt tradition from Graz and Berlin to Padua, Frankfurt and New York. It presents diagrammatically the main influence and teacher-pupil relationships also groupings into schools. It includes the classical texts of the Gestalt psychological tradition, together with the more important translations and reprints thereof. Special attention is paid to works on the following topics: - the concept of Prägnanz o…Read more
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1235The birth of ontologyJournal of Knowledge Structures and Systems 3 (1): 57-66. 2022.This review focuses on the Ogdoas scholastica by Jacob Lorhard, published in 1606. The importance of this document turns on the fact that it contains what is almost certainly the first published occurrence of the term “ontology.” The body of the work consists in a series of diagrams called “diagraphs.” Relevant features of this compendium of diagraphs are: 1. that it does not in fact contain the word “ontology,” and 2. that Lorhard himself was not responsible for its content.
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337Implementing Dempster-Shafer Theory for property similarity in Conceptual Spaces modelingSensor Systems and Information Systems IV, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) SCITECH Forum 2022. 2022.Previous work has shown that the Complex Conceptual Spaces − Single Observation Mathematical framework is a useful tool for event characterization. This mathematical framework is developed on the basis of Conceptual Spaces and uses integer linear programming to find the needed similarity values. The work of this paper is focused primarily on space event characterization. In particular, the focus is on the ranking of threats for malicious space events such as a kinetic kill. To make the Conceptua…Read more
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305Ontology of plays for autonomous teaming and collaborationProceedings of the 14Th Seminar on Ontology Research in Brazil (Ontobras 2021), Ceur 3050, 9-22. 2021.We propose a domain-level ontology of plays for the facilitation of play-based collaborative autonomy among unmanned and manned-unmanned aircraft teams in the Army’s Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) mission domain. We define a play as a type of plan that prescribes some pattern of intentional acts that are intended to reliably result in some goal in some competitive context, and which specifies one or more roles that are realized by those prescribed intentional acts. The ontology is well suited to…Read more
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812We propose a definition of capability as a class intermediate between function and disposition as the latter are defined in Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). A disposition inheres in a material entity and is realized in a certain kind of process. An example is the disposition of a glass to break when struck, which is realized when it shatters. A function is a disposition which is (simply put) the rationale for the existence of its bearer. To say for example that a water pump has the function to pump …Read more
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462The bridge between philosophy and information-driven science.Journal of Knowledge Structures and Systems 2 (2): 47-55. 2021.This essay is a response to Luis M. Augusto’s intriguing paper on the rift between mainstream and formal ontology. I will show that there are in fact two questions at issue here: 1. concerning the links between mainstream and formal approaches within philosophy, and 2. concerning the application of philosophy (and especially philosophical ontology) in support of information-driven research for example in the life sciences.
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425Since the noun phrase `artificial intelligence' (AI) was coined, it has been debated whether humans are able to create intelligence using technology. We shed new light on this question from the point of view of themodynamics and mathematics. First, we define what it is to be an agent (device) that could be the bearer of AI. Then we show that the mainstream definitions of `intelligence' proposed by Hutter and others and still accepted by the AI community are too weak even to capture what is invol…Read more
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211房地产的形而上学In Francesco Di Iorio & Jun Hu (eds.), 能动性与社会动力学——经济学哲学与社会科学哲学论文集 (Agency and Social Dynamics: Essays in the Philosophy of Economics and the Social Sciences), Nankai University Press. pp. 111-125. 2021.The parceling of land into real estate is more than a simple geometrical affair. Real estate is a historical product of interaction between human beings, political, legal and economic institutions, and the physical environment. And while many authors, from Jeremy Bentham to Hernando de Soto, have drawn attention to the ontological (metaphysical) aspect of property in general, no comprehensive analysis of landed property has been attempted. The paper presents such an analysis and shows how landed…Read more
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720BFO-based ontology enhancement to promote interoperability in BIMApplied ontology 16 (4). 2021.Building Information Modelling (BIM) is a process for managing construction project information in such a way as to provide a basis for enhanced decision-making and for collaboration in a construction supply chain. One impediment to the uptake of BIM is the limited interoperability of different BIM systems. To overcome this problem, a set of Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) has been proposed as a standard for the construction industry. Building on IFC, the ifcOWL ontology was developed in order…Read more
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356An ontological approach to enhancing information sharing in disaster responseInformation 12 (10). 2021.Managing complex disaster situations is a challenging task because of the large number of actors involved and the critical nature of the events themselves. In particular, the different terminologies and technical vocabularies that are being exchanged among Emergency Responders may lead to misunderstandings. Maintaining a shared semantics for exchanged data is a major challenge. To help to overcome these issues, we elaborate a modular suite of ontologies called POLARISCO that formalizes the compl…Read more
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520Common Core Conformant Definitions for an Ontology of Commercial Exchange2nd International Workshop on Ontology of Social, Legal and Economic Entities (SoLEE). 2021.In “Toward an Ontology of Commercial Exchange” [11], we proposed human readable definitions for terms that are central to an ontology of commercial exchange. This paper furthers that project in two ways. First, the definitions have been modified to be compatible with the Common Core Ontologies (CCO). CCO is used in a wide variety of domains including the industrial and military domains. Having a commerce ontology compatible with CCO allows data about the exchange of goods relevant to those domai…Read more
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544Benefits of Realist Ontologies to Systems Engineering8th International Workshop on Ontologies and Conceptual Modelling (OntoCom). 2021.Applied ontologies have been used more and more frequently to enhance systems engineering. In this paper, we argue that adopting principles of ontological realism can increase the benefits that ontologies have already been shown to provide to the systems engineering process. Moreover, adopting Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), an ISO standard for top-level ontologies from which more domain specific ontologies are constructed, can lead to benefits in four distinct areas of systems engineering: (1) int…Read more
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646Biomedical OntologiesIn Peter L. Elkin (ed.), Terminology, Ontology and Their Implementations: Teaching Guide and Notes, Springer. pp. 125-169. 2022.We begin at the beginning, with an outline of Aristotle’s views on ontology and with a discussion of the influence of these views on Linnaeus. We move from there to consider the data standardization initiatives launched in the 19th century, and then turn to investigate how the idea of computational ontologies developed in the AI and knowledge representation communities in the closing decades of the 20th century. We show how aspects of this idea, particularly those relating to the use of the term…Read more
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368Ontology-driven multicriteria decision support for victim evacuationInternational Journal of Information Technology and Decision Making. 2021.Abstract In light of the complexity of unfolding disasters, the diversity of rapidly evolving events, the enormous amount of generated information, and the huge pool of casualties, emergency responders (ERs) may be overwhelmed and in consequence poor decisions may be made. In fact, the possibility of transporting the wounded victims to one of several hospitals and the dynamic changes in healthcare resource availability make the decision process more complex. To tackle this problem, we propose a …Read more
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216Adolf Reinach: An annotated bibliographyIn Kevin Mulligan (ed.), Speech Act and Sachverhalt. Reinach and the Foundations of Realist Phenomenology, Reidel. pp. 299-332. 1987.Reinach is principally known for his anticipation in 1913 of many ideas subsequently developed by Austin, Searle and others under the heading of 'speech act theory'. This bibliography of primary and secondary literature by and on Reinach shows that his influenced extended more broadly into areas such as the theory of judgment, the ontology of states of affairs, and the philosophy of law.
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361The Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) perspectivesProceedings: Industrial Ontology Foundry (IOF) Achieving Data Interoperability Workshop, International Conference on Interoperability for Enterprise Systems and Applications, Tarbes, France, March 17-24, 2020. 2021.In recent years there has been a number of promising technical and institutional developments regarding use of ontologies in industry. At the same time, however, most industrial ontology development work remains within the realm of academic research and is without significant uptake in commercial applications. In biomedicine, by contrast, ontologies have made significant inroads as valuable tools for achieving interoperability between data systems whose contents derive from widely heterogeneous …Read more
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328Biological ontologies are used to organize, curate, and interpret the vast quantities of data arising from biological experiments. While this works well when using a single ontology, integrating multiple ontologies can be problematic, as they are developed independently, which can lead to incompatibilities. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry was created to address this by facilitating the development, harmonization, application, and sharing of ontologies, guided by a set of ov…Read more
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155Preface: Austrian economics from Menger to HayekIn Wolfgang Grassl & Barry Smith (eds.), Austrian Economics: Historical and Philosophical Background, Croom Helm, Reprinted: Routledge Revivals 2010. 1986.
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470Making space: The natural, cultural, cognitive and social niches of human activityCognitive Processing 22 (supplementary issue 1): 77-87. 2021.This paper is in two parts. Part 1 examines the phenomenon of making space as a process involving one or other kind of legal decision-making, for example when a state authority authorizes the creation of a new highway along a certain route or the creation of a new park in a certain location. In cases such as this a new abstract spatial entity comes into existence – the route, the area set aside for the park – followed only later by concordant changes in physical reality. In Part 2 we show that f…Read more
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248On the Theory of the Negative JudgmentIn Barry Smith (ed.), Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology, Philosophia Verlag. 1982.Distinguishes two senses of 'judgment' on the one hand as meaning a state of 'conviction' or 'belief', and on the other hand as meaning an act of 'affirmation' or 'assertion'. Certainly conviction and assertion stand in close relation to each other, but they delineate two heterogeneous logical spheres, and thereby divide the total field of the theory of judgment into two neighbouring but separate sub-fields. Once this is done it is shown to have implications for our understanding especially of …Read more
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236Gestalt level and Gestalt purity (trans. B. Smith)In Barry Smith (ed.), Foundations of Gestalt Theory, Philosophia. pp. 118-120. 1988.The fact that there is such a thing as a degree of formedness [Gestaltung], that every Gestalt has a certain Gestalt level, is of fundamental significance. A rose is a Gestalt of higher level than a heap of sand: this we recognize just as immediately as that red is a fuller, more lively colour than grey. The higher Gestalten are distinguished further from the lower by the fact that the product of unity and multiplicity [Einheit und Mannigfaltigkeit] is in their case greater.
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443On 'Gestalt qualities' (trans. B. Smith)In Barry Smith (ed.), Foundations of Gestalt Theory, Philosophia. pp. 82--117. 1988.The theory of Gestalt qualities arose from the attempt to explain how a melody is distinct from the collection of the tones which it comprehends. In this essay from 1890 Christian von Ehrenfels coined the term 'Gestaltqualität' to capture the idea of a pattern which is comprehensible in a single experience. This idea can be applied not only to melodies and other occurrent patterns, but also to continuant patterns such as shapes and colour arrays such as the array of a chess board. Ehrenfel's ess…Read more
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176Neural ChitchatThe Sherry Turkle Miracle. 2021.A constant theme in Sherry Turkle’s work is the idea that computers shape our social and psychological lives. This idea is of course in a sense trivial, as can be observed when walking down any city street and noting how many of the passers-by have their heads buried in screens. In The Second Self, however, Turkle makes a stronger claim to the effect that where people confront machines that seem to think this suggests a new way for us to think – about human thought, emotion, memory, and understa…Read more
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248Ontology (Science)In Carola Eschenbach & Mike Grüninger (eds.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference (FOIS 2008), Amsterdam: Ios Press. pp. 21-35. 2008.Increasingly, in data-intensive areas of the life sciences, experimental results are being described in algorithmically useful ways with the help of ontologies. Such ontologies are authored and maintained by scientists to support the retrieval, integration and analysis of their data. The proposition to be defended here is that ontologies of this type – the Gene Ontology (GO) being the most conspicuous example – are a part of science. Initial evidence for the truth of this proposition (which some…Read more
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545Living High and Letting DiePhilosophy 76 (297). 2001.Imagine that your body has become attached, without your permission, to that of a sick violinist. The violinist is a human being. He will die if you detach him. Such detachment seems, nonetheless, to be morally permissible. Thomson argues that an unwantedly pregnant woman is in an analogous situation. Her argument is considered by many to have established the moral permissibility of abortion even under the assumption that the foetus is a human being. Another popular argument is that presented by…Read more
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279Wind Turbine Analysis ProjectFinal Project Report. 2018.The report describes an application of ontologies to the analysis of wind turbine manufacturing data. We show how applying ontologies to composite materials data may facilitate the discovery of optimum composite material designs that will deliver maximum wind turbine blade performance within environmental constraints.
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334CIDO: The Community-Based Coronavirus Infectious Disease OntologyProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies (ICBO) and 10th Workshop on Ontologies and Data in Life Sciences (ODLS). 2021.Current COVID-19 pandemic and previous SARS/MERS outbreaks have caused a series of major crises to global public health. We must integrate the large and exponentially growing amount of heterogeneous coronavirus data to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechanisms, in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs. Ontologies have emerged to play an important role in standard knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. We have init…Read more
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300CTO: A Community-Based Clinical Trial Ontology and Its Applications in PubChemRDF and SCAIViewHProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies (ICBO) and 10th Workshop on Ontologies and Data in Life Sciences (ODLS). 2021.Driven by the use cases of PubChemRDF and SCAIView, we have developed a first community-based clinical trial ontology (CTO) by following the OBO Foundry principles. CTO uses the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as the top level ontology and reuses many terms from existing ontologies. CTO has also defined many clinical trial-specific terms. The general CTO design pattern is based on the PICO framework together with two applications. First, the PubChemRDF use case demonstrates how a drug Gleevec is lin…Read more
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314Peer Review Report: Ontologies relevant to behaviour change interventions, version 3Human Behaviour Change Project. 2021.In the present review we focus on what we take to be some remaining issues with the Behaviour Change Intervention Ontology (BCIO). We are in full agreement with the authors’ endorsement of the principles of best practice for ontology development In particular, we agree that an ontology should be “logically consistent and having a clear structures [sic], preferably a well-organised hierarchical structure,” and that “Maximising the new ontology’s interoperability with existing ontologies by reusin…Read more
Barry Smith
University at Buffalo
National Center for Ontological Research
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University at BuffaloDepartment of Philosophy
Biomedical Informatics
Neurology
Computer Science and EngineeringDistinguished Professor, Julian Park Chair -
National Center for Ontological ResearchAdministrator
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APA Eastern Division
Buffalo, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Ontology |
Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence |
Philosophy of Biology |