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739Strengths and Limitations of Formal Ontologies in the Biomedical DomainElectronic Journal of Communication, Information and Innovation in Health 3 (1): 31-45. 2009.We propose a typology of representational artifacts for health care and life sciences domains and associate this typology with different kinds of formal ontology and logic, drawing conclusions as to the strengths and limitations for ontology in a description logics framework. The four types of domain representation we consider are: (i) lexico-semantic representation, (ii) representation of types of entities, (iii) representations of background knowledge, and (iv) representation of individuals. W…Read more
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276Philosophie und biomedizinische ForschungAllgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 30 (1). 2005.Die bahnbrechenden wissenschaftlichen Ergebnisse der letzten Jahre erzwingen eine neue philosophische Auseinandersetzung mit den Grundkategorien der Biologie und der benachbarten Disziplinen. Insbesondere die Anwendung neuer informationstechnischer Mittel in der biomedizinischen Forschung und die damit verbundene, kontinuierlich zunehmende Datenflut sowie die Notwendigkeit, ihrer Herr zu werden, erfordern ein konsequentes Nachdenken darüber, wie biologische Daten systematisiert und klassifizier…Read more
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1Interdisciplinary Ontology, Vol. 3: Proceedings of the Third Interdisciplinary Ontology Meeting (edited book)Keio University Press. 2010.
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1825On Luck, Responsibility and the Meaning of LifePhilosophical Papers 34 (3): 443-458. 2005.A meaningful life, we shall argue, is a life upon which a certain sort of valuable pattern has been imposed by the person in question - a pattern which involves in serious ways the person having an effect upon the world. Meaningfulness is thus a special kind of value which a human life can bear. Two interrelated difficulties face ths proposal. One concerns responsiblity: how are we to account for the fact that a life that satisfies the above criteria can have more meaning than a life with the sa…Read more
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886Ontologies as Integrative Tools for Plant ScienceAmerican Journal of Botany 99 (8). 2012.Bio-ontologies are essential tools for accessing and analyzing the rapidly growing pool of plant genomic and phenomic data. Ontologies provide structured vocabularies to support consistent aggregation of data and a semantic framework for automated analyses and reasoning. They are a key component of the Semantic Web. This paper provides background on what bio-ontologies are, why they are relevant to botany, and the principles of ontology development. It includes an overview of ontologies and rela…Read more
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187Ingarden versus Meinong o logice fikcjiIn Z. Muszyński (ed.), Z badań nad prawdą i poznaniem, Wydawnictwo Umc-s. 1998.: For Meinong, familiarly, fictional entities are not created, but rather merely discovered (or picked out) from the inexhaustible realm of Aussersein (beyond being and non-being). The phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, in contrast, offers in his Literary Work of Art of 1931 a constructive ontology of fiction, which views fictional objects as entities which are created by the acts of an author (as laws, for example, are created by acts of parliament). We outline the logic of fiction which is implie…Read more
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316LinkSuite™: Software Tools for Formally Robust Ontology-Based Data and Information IntegrationIn Werner Ceusters, Barry Smith & James Matthew Fielding (eds.), Proceedings of DILS 2004 (Data Integration in the Life Sciences), (Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics, 2994), Springer. pp. 1-16. 2004.The integration of information resources in the life sciences is one of the most challenging problems facing bioinformatics today. We describe how Language and Computing nv, originally a developer of ontology-based natural language understanding systems for the healthcare domain, is developing a framework for the integration of structured data with unstructured information contained in natural language texts. L&C’s LinkSuite™ combines the flexibility of a modular software architecture with an on…Read more
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555Modelling Principles and Methodologies: Relations in Anatomical OntologiesIn Albert Burger, Duncan Davidson & Richard Baldock (eds.), Anatomy Ontologies for Bioinformatics: Principles and Practice, Springer. pp. 289--306. 2008.It is now increasingly accepted that many existing biological and medical ontologies can be improved by adopting tools and methods that bring a greater degree of logical and ontological rigor. In this chapter we will focus on the merits of a logically sound approach to ontologies from a methodological point of view. As we shall see, one crucial feature of a logically sound approach is that we have clear and functional definitions of the relational expressions such as ‘is a’ and ‘part of ’.
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223On the Phases of ReismIn Arkadiusz Chrudzimski & Dariusz Łukasiewicz (eds.), Actions, products, and things: Brentano and Polish philosophy, Ontos. pp. 137--183. 2006.Kotarbiński is one of the leading figures in the Lvov-Warsaw school of Polish philosophy. We summarize the development of Kotarbiński’s thought from his early nominalism and ‘pansomatistic reism’ to the later doctrine of ‘temporal phases’. We show that the surface clarity and simplicity of Kotarbiński’s writings mask a number of profound philosophical difficulties, connected above all with the problem of giving an adequate account of the truth of contingent (tensed) predications. The paper will …Read more
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392Bodily Systems and the Modular Structure of the Human BodyArtificial Intelligence in Medicine (Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence 2780) 9 86-90. 2003.Medical science conceives the human body as a system comprised of many subsystems at a variety of levels. At the highest level are bodily systems proper, such as the endocrine system, which are central to our understanding of human anatomy, and play a key role in diagnosis and in dynamic modeling as well as in medical pedagogy and computer visualization. But there is no explicit definition of what a bodily system is; such informality is acceptable in documentation created for human beings, but f…Read more
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613The metaphysics of real estateTopoi 20 (2): 161-172. 2001.The thesis that an analysis of property rights is essential to an adequate analysis of the state is a mainstay of political philosophy. The contours of the type of government a society has are shaped by the system regulating the property rights prevailing in that society. Views of this sort are widespread. They range from Locke to Nozick and encompass pretty much everything else in between. Defenders of this sort of view accord to property rights supreme importance. A state that does not suffici…Read more
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1193On substances, accidents and universals: In defence of a constituent ontologyPhilosophical Papers 26 (1): 105-127. 1997.The essay constructs an ontological theory designed to capture the categories instantiated in those portions or levels of reality which are captured in our common sense conceptual scheme. It takes as its starting point an Aristotelian ontology of “substances” and “accidents”, which are treated via the instruments of mereology and topology. The theory recognizes not only individual parts of substances and accidents, including the internal and external boundaries of these, but also universal parts…Read more
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1081True gridIn Daniel R. Montello (ed.), Spatial Information Theory: Foundations of Geographic Information Science, Springer. pp. 14-27. 2001.The Renaissance architect, moral philosopher, cryptographer, mathematician, Papal adviser, painter, city planner and land surveyor Leon Battista Alberti provided the theoretical foundations of modern perspective geometry. Alberti’s work on perspective exerted a powerful influence on painters of the stature of Albrecht Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci and Piero della Francesca. But his Della pittura of 1435–36 contains also a hitherto unrecognized ontology of pictorial projection. We sketch this ontology…Read more
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1006HL7 RIM: An incoherent standardStudies in Health Technology and Informatics 124 (Proceedings of MIE 2006). 2006.The Health Level 7 Reference Information Model (HL7 RIM) is lauded by its authors as ‘the foundation of healthcare interoperability’. Yet even after some 10 years of development work, the RIM is still subject to a variety of logical and ontological flaws which have placed severe obstacles in the way of those who are called upon to develop implementations. We offer evidence that these obstacles are insurmountable and that the time has come to abandon an unworkable paradigm.
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2053Function, role and disposition in Basic Formal OntologyProceedings of Bio-Ontologies Workshop, Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), Toronto. 2008.Numerous research groups are now utilizing Basic Formal Ontology as an upper-level framework to assist in the organization and integration of biomedical information. This paper provides elucidation of the three existing BFO subcategories of realizable entity, namely function, role, and disposition. It proposes one further sub-category of tendency, and considers the merits of recognizing two sub-categories of function for domain ontologies, namely, artifactual and biological function. The motivat…Read more
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1879Mach and Ehrenfels: The foundations of Gestalt TheoryIn Barry Smith (ed.), Foundations of Gestalt Theory, Philosophia Verlag. pp. 124-157. 1988.Ernst Mach's atomistic theory of sensation faces problems in doing justice to our ability to perceive and remember complex phenomena such as melodies and shapes. Christian von Ehrenfels attempted to solve these problems with his theory of "Gestalt qualities", which he sees as entities depending one-sidedly on the corresponding simple objects of sensation. We explore the theory of dependence relations advanced by Ehrenfels and show how it relates to the views on the objects of perception advanced…Read more
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481Ontologia i analiza logiczna rzeczywistościFilozofia Nauki 2 5-22. 1994.The author attempts to show how mereology, taken together with certain topological notions, can yield the foundations for future investigations in formal ontology. He also attempts to show how the mereological framework allows for the direct and natural formulation of a series of theses - for example pertaining to the concept of a boundary - which can be only indirectly formulated (if at all) in set-theoretic terms. The far-reaching ain of the present framework is to serve as a basis for a forma…Read more
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532A science of topography: Bridging the qualitative-quantitative divideIn David M. Mark & Barry Smith (eds.), Geographic Information Science and Mountain Geomorphology, Chichester, England: Springer-praxis. pp. 75--100. 2004.The shape of the Earth's surface, its topography, is a fundamental dimension of the environment, shaping or mediating many other environmental flows or functions. But there is a major divergence in the way that topography is conceptualized in different domains. Topographic cartographers, information scientists, geomorphologists and environmental modelers typically conceptualize topographic variability as a continuous field of elevations or as some discrete approximation to such a field. Pilots, …Read more
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415Boundaries: An essay in mereotopologyIn Lewis H. Hahn (ed.), Philosophy of Roderick Chisholm (Library of Living Philosophers), Open Court. pp. 534--561. 1997.Of Chisholm’s many signal contributions to analytic metaphysics, perhaps the most important is his treatment of boundaries, a category of entity that has been neglected, to say the least, in the history of ontology. We can gain some preliminary idea of the sorts of problems which the Chisholmian ontology of boundaries is designed to solve, if we consider the following Zeno-inspired thought-experiment.
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709The cornucopia of formal-ontological relationsDialectica 58 (3). 2004.The paper presents a new method for generating typologies of formal-ontological relations. The guiding idea is that formal relations are those sorts of relations which hold between entities which are constituents of distinct ontologies. We provide examples of ontologies (in the spirit of Zemach’s classic “Four Ontologies” of 1970), and show how these can be used to give a rich typology of formal relations in a way which also throws light on the opposition between threeand four-dimensionalism.
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1096Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology (edited book)Philosophia Verlag. 1982.A collection of material on Husserl's Logical Investigations, and specifically on Husserl's formal theory of parts, wholes and dependence and its influence in ontology, logic and psychology. Includes translations of classic works by Adolf Reinach and Eugenie Ginsberg, as well as original contributions by Wolfgang Künne, Kevin Mulligan, Gilbert Null, Barry Smith, Peter M. Simons, Roger A. Simons and Dallas Willard. Documents work on Husserl's ontology arising out of early meetings of the Seminar…Read more
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484Granular Spatio-Temporal OntologiesIn Thomas Bittner & Barry Smith (eds.), AAAI Symposium: Foundations and Applications of Spatio-Temporal Reasoning (FASTR), . pp. 12-17. 2003.We propose an ontological theory that is powerful enough to describe both complex spatio-temporal processes (occurrents) and the enduring entities (continuants) that participate therein. The theory is divided into two major categories of sub-theories: (sub-) theories of type SPAN and (sub-)theories of type SNAP. These theories represent two complementary perspectives on reality and result in distinct though compatible systems of categories. In SNAP we have enduring entities such as substances,…Read more
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504Weininger und WittgensteinTeoria 2. 1984.The paper [which is in German] seeks to show how Weininger’s interpretations of Kant and Schopenhauer help us to understand some of the peculiar reflections on the will, on happiness and unhappiness, and on the problems of life, which are to be found in Wittgenstein's Notebooks. It seeks to explain, above all, why Wittgenstein should wish to reject the basic ethical axiom of “love thy neighbor.” There follows a sketch of one possible Kantian interpretation of the Tractatus along Weiningerian lin…Read more
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484OAE: The Ontology of Adverse EventsJournal of Biomedical Semantics 5 (29): 1-13. 2014.A medical intervention is a medical procedure or application intended to relieve or prevent illness or injury. Examples of medical interventions include vaccination and drug administration. After a medical intervention, adverse events (AEs) may occur which lie outside the intended consequences of the intervention. The representation and analysis of AEs are critical to the improvement of public health. Description: The Ontology of Adverse Events (OAE), previously named Adverse Event Ontology (AEO…Read more
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519Objects and their environments: From Aristotle to ecological ontologyIn Andrew U. Frank, Jonathan Raper & Jean-Paul Cheylan (eds.), The Life and Motion of Socio-Economic Units, Taylor & Francis. pp. 79-97. 2001.What follows is a contribution to the theory of space and of spatial objects. It takes as its starting point the philosophical subfield of ontology, which can be defined as the science of what is: of the various types and categories of objects and relations in all realms of being. More specifically, it begins with ideas set forth by Aristotle in his Categories and Metaphysics, two works which constitute the first great contributions to ontological science. Because Aristotle’s ontological ideas w…Read more
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1090The Ontology of Fields (edited book)National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis. 1998.In the specific case of geography, the real world consists on the one hand of physical geographic features (bona fide objects) and on the other hand of various fiat objects, for example legal and administrative objects, including parcels of real estate, areas of given soil types, census tracts, and so on. It contains in addition the beliefs and actions of human beings directed towards these objects (for example, the actions of those who work in land registries or in census bureaux), and the rela…Read more
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1656Aristotle, Menger, Mises: An essay in the metaphysics of economicsHistory of Political Economy, Annual Supplement 22 263-288. 1990.There are, familiarly, a range of distinct and competing accounts of the methodological underpinnings of Menger' s work. These include Leibnizian, Kantian, Millian, and even Popperian readings; but they include also readings of an Aristotelian sort, and I have myself made a number of contributions in clarification and defence of the latter. Not only, I have argued, does the historical situation in which Menger found himself point to the inevitability of the Aristotelian reading; this reading …Read more
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476Toward a Realistic Science of EnvironmentsEcological Psychology 21 (2): 121-130. 2009.The perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson embraces a radically externalistic view of mind and action. We have, for Gibson, not a Cartesian mind or soul, with its interior theater of contents and the consequent problem of explaining how this mind or soul and its psychological environment can succeed in grasping physical objects external to itself. Rather, we have a perceiving, acting organism, whose perceptions and actions are always already tuned to the parts and moments, the things and surfaces,…Read more
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404Establishing and Harmonizing Ontologies in an Interdisciplinary Health Care and Clinical Research EnvironmentStudies in Health, Technology and Informatics 134 219-234. 2008.Ontologies are being ever more commonly used in biomedical informatics and we provide a survey of some of these uses, and of the relations between ontologies and other terminology resources. In order for ontologies to become truly useful, two objectives must be met. First, ways must be found for the transparent evaluation of ontologies. Second, existing ontologies need to be harmonised. We argue that one key foundation for both ontology evaluation and harmonisation is the adoption of a realist p…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 |