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414Kasimir Twardowski: An Essay on the Borderlines of Psychology, Ontology and LogicIn K. Szaniawski (ed.), The Vienna Circle and the Philosophy of the Lvov-Warsaw School, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 313--375. 1988.The influence of Kasimir Twardowski on modern Polish philosophy is all-pervasive. As is well known, almost all important 20th century Polish philosophers went through the hard training of his courses in Lvov. Twardowski instilled in his students an enduring concern for clarity and rigour. He taught them to regard philosophy as a collaborative effort, a matter of disciplined discussion and argument. And he encouraged them to work together with scientists from other disciplines — above all with ps…Read more
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462Towards a Reference Terminology for Ontology Research and Development in the Biomedical DomainIn Barry Smith, Waclaw Kusnierczyk, Daniel Schober & Werner Ceusters (eds.), Proceedings of KR-MED, CEUR, vol. 222, . pp. 57-65. 2006.Ontology is a burgeoning field, involving researchers from the computer science, philosophy, data and software engineering, logic, linguistics, and terminology domains. Many ontology-related terms with precise meanings in one of these domains have different meanings in others. Our purpose here is to initiate a path towards disambiguation of such terms. We draw primarily on the literature of biomedical informatics, not least because the problems caused by unclear or ambiguous use of terms have be…Read more
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231How to Distinguish Parthood from Location in BioontologiesIn Stefan Schulz, Philipp Daumke, Barry Smith & Udo Hahn (eds.), Proceedings of the AMIA Symposium, American Medical Informatics Association. pp. 669-673. 2005.The pivotal role of the relation part-of in the description of living organisms is widely acknowledged. Organisms are open systems, which means that in contradistinction to mechanical artifacts they are characterized by a continuous flow and exchange of matter. A closer analysis of the spatial relations in biological organisms reveals that the decision as to whether a given particular is part-of a second particular or whether it is only contained-in the second particular is often controversial. …Read more
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609Ontological tools for geographic representationIn Nicola Guarino (ed.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS), Ios Press. pp. 77--85. 1998.This paper is concerned with certain ontological issues in the foundations of geographic representation. It sets out what these basic issues are, describes the tools needed to deal with them, and draws some implications for a general theory of spatial representation. Our approach has ramifications in the domains of mereology, topology, and the theory of location, and the question of the interaction of these three domains within a unified spatial representation theory is addressed. In the final p…Read more
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588Philosophie, Politik und Wissenschaftliche WeltauffassungGrazer Philosophische Studien 58 (1): 1-22. 2000.Die Entwicklung der Philosophie in Österreich unterscheidet sich in markanter Weise von der Hauptlinie der philosophischen Entwicklung in Deutschland. Dabei fällt bei der österreichischen Philosophie vor allem die konsequente Orientierung an den Wissenschaften auf. In der philosophiegeschichtlichen Forschung sind für diese Besonderheit der österreichischen Philosophie z. B. von Otto Neurath, Rudolf Haller, Friedrich Stadier und J.C. Nyiri verschiedene Erklärungen vorgeschlagen worden. In diesen …Read more
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490Why Polish philosophy does not existIn J. Jadacki & J. Pasniczek (eds.), The Lvov-Warsaw School: The New Generation, Reidel. pp. 19-39. 2006.Why have Polish philosophers fared so badly as concerns their admission into the pantheon of Continental Philosophers? Why, for example, should Heidegger and Derrida be included in this pantheon, but not Ingarden or Tarski? Why, to put the question from another side, should there be so close an association in Poland between philosophy and logic, and between philosophy and science? We distinguish a series of answers to this question, which are dealt with under the following headings: (a) the role…Read more
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1123Characteristica UniversalisIn Kevin Mulligan (ed.), Language, Truth and Ontology, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 48--77. 1992.Recent work in formal philosophy has concentrated over-whelmingly on the logical problems pertaining to epistemic shortfall - which is to say on the various ways in which partial and sometimes incorrect information may be stored and processed. A directly depicting language, in contrast, would reflect a condition of epistemic perfection. It would enable us to construct representations not of our knowledge but of the structures of reality itself, in much the way that chemical diagrams allow the re…Read more
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292Referent Tracking: The Problem of Negative FindingsStudies in Health Technology and Informatics 124 741-46. 2006.The paradigm of referent tracking is based on a realist presupposition which rejects so-called negative entities (congenital absent nipple, and the like) as spurious. How, then, can a referent tracking-based Electronic Health Record deal with what are standardly called ‘negative findings’? To answer this question we carried out an analysis of some 748 sentences drawn from patient charts and containing some form of negation. Our analysis shows that to deal with these sentences we need to introduc…Read more
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3480Applied Ontology: An Introduction (edited book)ontos. 2008.Ontology is the philosophical discipline which aims to understand how things in the world are divided into categories and how these categories are related together. This is exactly what information scientists aim for in creating structured, automated representations, called 'ontologies,' for managing information in fields such as science, government, industry, and healthcare. Currently, these systems are designed in a variety of different ways, so they cannot share data with one another. They ar…Read more
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270A Formal Theory of Substances, Qualities, and UniversalsIn Achille Varzi & Laure Vieu (eds.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems. Proceedings of the Third International Conference, Ios Press. 2004.One of the tasks of ontology in information science is to support the classification of entities according to their kinds and qualities. We hold that to realize this task as far as entities such as material objects are concerned we need to distinguish four kinds of entities: substance particulars, quality particulars, substance universals, and quality universals. These form, so to speak, an ontological square. We present a formal theory of classification based on this idea, including both a sema…Read more
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534Logica e ontologia formale nelle «Logische Untersuchungen» di HusserlRivista di Filosofia 83 (1): 53-70. 1991.Per Husserl, come per Bolzano, la logica e una dottrina della sdenza. Husserl prende pero piu sul serio l'idea che le teorie scientifiche siano costituite dagli atti mentali di soggetti conoscenti. Quella che segue e un' esposizione della concezione husserliana della logica e della scienza, fondata appunto sugli atti; essa approdera a una delineazione dell'idea husserliana di «ontologia formale».
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532On the Cognition of States of AffairsIn Kevin Mulligan (ed.), Speech Act and Sachverhalt: Reinach and the Foundations of Realist Phenomenology, M. Nijhoff. pp. 189-225. 1987.The theory of speech acts put forward by Adolf Reinach in his "The A Priori Foundations of the Civil Law" of 1913 rests on a systematic account of the ontological structures associated with various different sorts of language use. One of the most original features of Reinach's account lies in hIs demonstration of how the ontological structure of, say, an action of promising or of commanding, may be modified in different ways, yielding different sorts of non-standard instances of the correspondin…Read more
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859The substance of Brentano's ontologyTopoi 6 (1): 39-49. 1987.This paper is a study of Brentano’s ontology, and more specifically of his theory of substance and accident as put forward toward the end of his life in the materials collected together as the Kategorienlehre or Theory of Categories. Here Brentano presents an auditious (re-)interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of substance and accidence. We show that on the Brentano initially defends, it is space which serves as the single substance upon which all other entities depend as accidents of space. In …Read more
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736Biomedical imaging ontologies: A survey and proposal for future workJournal of Pathology Informatics 6 (37): 37. 2015.Ontology is one strategy for promoting interoperability of heterogeneous data through consistent tagging. An ontology is a controlled structured vocabulary consisting of general terms (such as “cell” or “image” or “tissue” or “microscope”) that form the basis for such tagging. These terms are designed to represent the types of entities in the domain of reality that the ontology has been devised to capture; the terms are provided with logical defi nitions thereby also supporting reasoning over th…Read more
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265On the ontology of functionsApplied ontology 6 (2): 99-104. 2011.This special issue of Applied Ontology is devoted to the foundation, the comparison and the application of functional theories in all areas, with particular attention to the biological and engineering domains. It includes theoretical and technical contributions related to the description, characterization, and application of functions.
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475Beyond PaperThe Monist 97 (2). 2014.The authors outline the way in which documents as social objects have evolved from their earliest forms to the electronic documents of the present day. They note that while certain features have remained consistent, processes regarding document authentication are seriously complicated by the easy reproducibility of digital entities. The authors argue that electronic documents also raise significant questions concerning the theory of ‘documentality’ advanced by Maurizio Ferraris, especially given…Read more
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225Il significato della vita: come valurare una civiltàIn Philippe Nemo & Jean Petitot (eds.), Storia del liberalismo in Europa, Rubbettino. 2013.In what respects is Western civilization superior or inferior to its rivals? In raising this question we are addressing a particularly strong form of the problem of relativism. For in order to compare civilizations one with another we would need to be in possession of a framework based on principles of evaluation which would be acceptable, in principle, to all human beings. Morality will surely provide one axis of such a framework (and we note in passing that believers in Islam might quite reaso…Read more
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1252When the U.S. conducts warfare, elements of a force are drawn from different services and work together as a single team to accomplish an assigned mission. To achieve such unified action, it is necessary that the doctrines governing the actions of members of specific services be both consistent with and subservient to joint Doctrine. Because warfighting today increasingly involves not only live forces but also automated systems, unified action requires that information technology that is used in…Read more
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495Framework for a protein ontologyBMC Bioinformatics 8 (Suppl 9). 2007.Biomedical ontologies are emerging as critical tools in genomic and proteomic research where complex data in disparate resources need to be integrated. A number of ontologies exist that describe the properties that can be attributed to proteins; for example, protein functions are described by Gene Ontology, while human diseases are described by Disease Ontology. There is, however, a gap in the current set of ontologies—one that describes the protein entities themselves and their relations…Read more
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201Ontologie des Mesokosmos. Soziale Objekte und UmweltenZeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 52 (4): 521-540. 1998.The paper relates classical treatments of physics and metaphysics to contemporary work on common sense in the field of artificial intelligence (J. Hobbs, P. Hayes, et al.). It defends the universality (and truth) of certain basic principles of common-sense physics and shows why these basic principles must leave certain issues undetermined.
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691The Neurath-Haller Thesis: Austria and the Rise of Scientific PhilosophyIn Keith Lehrer & Johann Christian Marek (eds.), Austrian Philosophy Past and Present, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 1-20. 1997.The term ‘Continental philosophy’ designates not philosophy on the continent of Europe as a whole, but rather a selective slice of Franco-German philosophy. Through a critical analysis of the arguments advanced by Otto Neurath, the paper addresses the issue of why Austrian philosophers in particular are not counted in the pantheon of Continental philosophers. Austrian philosophy is marked by the predominance of philosophical analysis and of the philosophy of science. The paper concludes that it …Read more
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379A terminological and ontological analysis of the NCI thesaurusMethods of Information in Medicine 44 (4): 498-507. 2005.We performed a qualitative analysis of the Thesaurus in order to assess its conformity with principles of good practice in terminology and ontology design. We used both the on-line browsable version of the Thesaurus and its OWL-representation (version 04.08b, released on August 2, 2004), measuring each in light of the requirements put forward in relevant ISO terminology standards and in light of ontological principles advanced in the recent literature. Version 04.08b of the NCI Thesaurus suffers…Read more
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2044Building Ontologies with Basic Formal OntologyMIT Press. 2015.In the era of “big data,” science is increasingly information driven, and the potential for computers to store, manage, and integrate massive amounts of data has given rise to such new disciplinary fields as biomedical informatics. Applied ontology offers a strategy for the organization of scientific information in computer-tractable form, drawing on concepts not only from computer and information science but also from linguistics, logic, and philosophy. This book provides an introduction to the…Read more
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1617The Space Object OntologyIn Alexander P. Cox, Christopher Nebelecky, Ronald Rudnicki, William Tagliaferri, John L. Crassidis & Barry Smith (eds.), 19th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION 2016), Ieee. 2016.Achieving space domain awareness requires the identification, characterization, and tracking of space objects. Storing and leveraging associated space object data for purposes such as hostile threat assessment, object identification, and collision prediction and avoidance present further challenges. Space objects are characterized according to a variety of parameters including their identifiers, design specifications, components, subsystems, capabilities, vulnerabilities, origins, missio…Read more
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648Husserl, Language and the Ontology of the ActIn Dino Buzzetti & M. Ferriani (eds.), Speculative Grammar, Universal Grammar, and Philosophical Analysis of Language, John Benjamins. pp. 205-227. 1987.The ontology of language is concerned with the relations between uses of language, both overt and covert, and other entities, whether in the world or in the mind of the thinking subject. We attempt a first survey of the sorts of relations which might come into question for such an ontology, including: relations between referring uses of expressions and their objects, relations between the use of a (true) sentence and that in the world which makes it true, relations between mental acts on the one…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 |