Barry Smith

University at Buffalo
National Center for Ontological Research
  • University at Buffalo
    Department of Philosophy
    Biomedical Informatics
    Neurology
    Computer Science and Engineering
    Distinguished Professor, Julian Park Chair
  • National Center for Ontological Research
    Administrator
  • Università della Svizzera Italiana
    Institute of Philosophy (ISFI)
    Visiting Professor (Part-time)
University of Manchester
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 1976
APA Eastern Division
CV
Buffalo, New York, United States of America
  •  526
    Austrian Origins of Logical Positivism
    In Barry Gower (ed.), Logical Positivism in Perspective, Croom Helm. pp. 35-68. 1988.
    Recent work on Austrian philosophy has revealed, hitherto, unsuspected links between Vienna circle positivism on the one hand, and the thought of Franz Brentano and his circle on the other. the paper explores these links, casting light also on the Polish analytic movement, on the development of gestalt psychology, and on the work of Schlick and Neurath.
  •  193
    Von T. G. Masaryk bis Jan Patočka: Eine philosophische Skizze
    In J. Zumr & T. Binder (eds.), T. G. Masaryk und die Brentano-Schule, Czech Academy of Sciences. pp. 94-110. 1993.
    Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, later founder and President of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, studied philosophy in the University of Vienna from 1872 to 1876, where he came under the powerful influence of Franz Brentano. We survey the role of Brentano’s philosophy, and especially of his ethics, in Masaryk’s life and work.
  •  219
    If we are to develop efficient, reliable and secure means for sharing information across healthcare systems and organizations, then a careful analysis of human actions will be needed. To address this need, the HL7 organization has proposed its Reference Information Model (RIM), which is designed to provide a comprehensive representation of the entire domain of healthcare centered around the phenomenon of human action. Taking the Basic Formal Ontology as our starting point, we examine the RIM fro…Read more
  •  961
    Two hundred and sixty-three subjects each gave examples for one of five geographic categories: geographic features, geographic objects, geographic concepts, something geographic, and something that could be portrayed on a map. The frequencies of various responses were significantly different, indicating that the basic ontological terms feature, object, etc., are not interchangeable but carry different meanings when combined with adjectives indicating geographic or mappable. For all of the test p…Read more
  •  198
    Comment: Kolnai’s Disgust
    Emotion Review 6 (3): 219-220. 2014.
    In his The Meaning of Disgust, Colin McGinn employs elements of the phenomenological theory of disgust advanced by Aurel Kolnai in 1929. Kolnai’s treatment of what he calls “material” disgust and of its primary elicitors—putrefying organic matter, bodily wastes and secretions, sticky contaminants, vermin—anticipates more recent scientific treatments of this emotion as a mode of protective recoil. While Nina Strohminger charges McGinn with neglecting such scientific studies, we here attempt to sh…Read more
  •  456
    SNAP and SPAN: Towards dynamic spatial ontology
    with Pierre Grenon
    Spatial Cognition and Computation 4 (1). 2004.
    We propose a modular ontology of the dynamic features of reality. This amounts, on the one hand, to a purely spatial ontology supporting snapshot views of the world at successive instants of time and, on the other hand, to a purely spatiotemporal ontology of change and process. We argue that dynamic spatial ontology must combine these two distinct types of inventory of the entities and relationships in reality, and we provide characterizations of spatiotemporal reasoning in the light of the inte…Read more
  •  562
    Amongst the entities making up social reality, are there necessary relations whose necessity is not a mere reflection of the logical connections between corresponding concepts? We distinguish three main groups of answers to this question, associated with Hume and Adolf Reinach at opposite extremes, and with Searle who occupies a position somewhere in the middle. We first set forth Reinach’s views on what he calls ‘material necessities’ in the realm of social entities. We then attempt to show tha…Read more
  •  1198
    As Kevin Mulligan, more than anyone else, has demonstrated, there is a distinction within the philosophy of the German-speaking world between two principal currents: of idealism / transcendentalism, characteristic of Northern Germany; and of realism / objectivism, characteristic of Austria and the South. We explore some of the implications of this distinction with reference to the influence of Austrian (and German) philosophy on philosophical developments in Hungary, focusing on the work of Ákos…Read more
  •  408
    The Role of Foundational Relations in the Alignment of Biomedical Ontologies
    with Cornelius Rosse
    In M. Fieschi, E. Coiera & Y.-C. J. Li (eds.), Medinfo, Ios Press. pp. 444-448. 2004.
    The Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) symbolically represents the structural organization of the human body from the macromolecular to the macroscopic levels, with the goal of providing a robust and consistent scheme for classifying anatomical entities that is designed to serve as a reference ontology in biomedical informatics. Here we articulate the need for formally clarifying the is-a and part-of relations in the FMA and similar ontology and terminology systems. We diagnose certain characte…Read more
  •  19
    Review of Ernest Davis: Representations of Commonsense Knowledge (review)
    Minds and Machines 4 (2): 245-249. 1994.
    Review of a compendium of alternative formal representations of common-sense knowledge. The book is centered largely on formal representations drawn from first-order logic, and thus lies in the tradition of Kenneth Forbus, Patrick Hayes and Jerry Hobbs.
  •  1108
    Frege and Husserl: The Ontology of Reference
    Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 9 (2). 1978.
    Analytic philosophers apply the term ‘object’ both to concreta and to abstracta of certain kinds. The theory of objects which this implies is shown to rest on a dichotomy between object-entities on the one hand and meaning-entities on the other, and it is suggested that the most adequate account of the latter is provided by Husserl’s theory of noemata. A two-story ontology of objects and meanings (concepts, classes) is defended, and Löwenheim’s work on class-representatives is cited as an indica…Read more
  •  41
    First published in 1986 and reprinted in 2010 in the Routledge Revivals series, this book presents the first detailed confrontation between the Austrian school of economics and Austrian philosophy, especially the philosophy of the Brentano school. It contains a study of the roots of Austrian economics in the liberal political theory of the nineteenth-century Hapsburg empire, and a study of the relations between the general theory of value underlying Austrian economics and the new economic approa…Read more
  •  385
    Persistence and Ontological Pluralism
    with Pierre Grenon
    In Christian Kanzian (ed.), Persistence, Ontos. pp. 33-48. 2007.
    We aim to provide the ontological grounds for an adequate account of persistence. We defend a perspectivalist, or moderate pluralist, position, according to which some aspects of reality can be accounted for in ontological terms only via partial and mutually complementary ontologies, each one of which captures some relevant aspect of reality. Our thesis here is that this is precisely the sort of ontological account that is needed for the understanding of persistence, specifically an account invo…Read more
  •  1248
    Questions: An essay in Daubertian phenomenology
    with Karl Schuhmann
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47 (3): 353-384. 1987.
    A number of logicians and philosophers have turned their attention in recent years to the problem of developing a logic of interrogatives. Their work has thrown a great deal of light on the formal properties of questions and question-sentences and has led also to interesting innovations in our understanding of the structures of performatives in general and, for example, in the theory of presuppositions. When, however, we examine the attempts of logicians such as Belnap or Åqvist to specify…Read more
  •  608
    The metaphysics of real estate
    Topoi 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
  •  50
    Prolegomena to a Metaphysics of Real Estate
    In Roberto Casati (ed.), Shadows and Socio-Economic Units. Foundations of Formal Geography, Technical University of Vienna. pp. 151--155. 1996.
    As an object in which property rights can be invested, land is a peculiar hybrid structure that comprehends both spatial and non-spatial aspects. Even in its purely spatial aspect land is treated differently from culture to culture, thus for example in the degree to which property rights in land are held to relate to vague or precisely delineated parcels and to portions of space above and below the surface of the earth. When we examine the non-spatial aspects of landed property, however, the dim…Read more
  •  877
    Ontologies as Integrative Tools for Plant Science
    with Ramona Walls, Balaji Athreya, Laurel Cooper, Justin Elser, Maria A. Gandolfo, Pankaj Jaiswal, Christopher J. Mungall, Justin Preece, Stefan Rensing, and Dennis W. Stevenson
    American 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
  •  182
    Carving Up Reality
    In Michael Gorman & Jonathan Sanford (eds.), Categories: Historical and Systematic Essays, Catholic University of America Press. pp. 225-237. 2004.
    If Mont Blanc is a vague object, then its vagueness will depend on the context in which reference is made. In a geological context the mountain might include only rock, perhaps together with a certain amount of air in the crevices and tunnels which have been formed beneath its surface. In a context of soil chemistry we might include also a surrounding thin layer of organic matter. In a skiing context we might include some snow. This essay sketches in informal terms the theory of granular partiti…Read more
  •  312
    LinkSuite™: Software Tools for Formally Robust Ontology-Based Data and Information Integration
    with Werner Ceusters and James Matthew Fielding
    In 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
  •  525
    Strategies for Referent Tracking in Electronic Health Records
    with Werner Ceusters
    Journal of Biomedical Informatics 39 (3): 362-378. 2006.
    The goal of referent tracking is to create an ever-growing pool of data relating to the entities existing in concrete spatiotemporal reality. In the context of Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs) the relevant concrete entities are not only particular patients but also their parts, diseases, therapies, lesions, and so forth, insofar as these are salient to diagnosis and treatment. Within a referent tracking system, all such entities are referred to directly and explicitly, something which cannot…Read more
  •  39
    Vor dem Hintergrund einer von Durkheim ausgehenden Selbstmordarten-Typologie wird das Phänomen von terroristischen Selbstmordattentaten untersucht: Diese scheinen ein spezifisch nicht-westliches Phänomen zu sein. Der deutliche Unterschied zwischen der Strategie westlicher Terrorgruppen und solchen Terrorgruppen, die Selbstmordattentate ausüben, geht auf ein besonderes Merkmal der Geschichte und der Eigenart des Westens zurück; und dies wiederum ist tief im Mittelalter verwurzelt. Against the bac…Read more
  •  453
    Creating the ontologists of the future
    with Fabian Neuhaus, Elizabeth Florescu, Antony Galton, Michael Gruninger, Nicola Guarino, Leo Obrst, Arturo Sanchez, Amanda Vizedom, and Peter Yim
    Applied ontology 6 (1): 91-98. 2011.
    The goal of the 2010 Ontology Summit was to address the current shortage of persons with ontology expertise by developing a strategy for the education of ontologists. To achieve this goal we studied how ontologists are currently trained, the requirements identified by organizations that hire ontologists, and developments that might impact the training of ontologists in the future. We developed recommendations for the body of knowledge that should be taught and the skills that should be developed …Read more
  •  701
    The cornucopia of formal-ontological relations
    with Pierre Grenon
    Dialectica 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.
  •  501
    On the Origins of Analytic Philosophy (review)
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 35 (1): 153-173. 1989.
    Analytic philosophers have until recently been reluctant to pursue historical investigations into the Central European roots of their own philosophical tradition. The most recent book by Michael Dummett, however, entitled Origins of Analytic Philosophy, shows how fruitful such investigations can be, not only as a means of coming to see familiar philosophical problems in a new light, but also as a means of clarifying what, precisely, ‘analytic philosophy’ might mean. As Dummett points out, the ne…Read more
  •  1073
    True grid
    In 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
  •  443
    Biodynamic Ontology: Applying BFO in the Biomedical Domain
    with Pierre Grenon and Louis Goldberg
    Studies in Health and Technology Informatics 102. 2004.
    Current approaches to formal representation in biomedicine are characterized by their focus on either the static or the dynamic aspects of biological reality. We here outline a theory that combines both perspectives and at the same time tackles the by no means trivial issue of their coherent integration. Our position is that a good ontology must be capable of accounting for reality both synchronically (as it exists at a time) and diachronically (as it unfolds through time), but that these are tw…Read more
  •  2043
    Function, role and disposition in Basic Formal Ontology
    with Robert Arp
    Proceedings 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
  •  436
    Living high and letting die
    Philosophy 76 (3): 435-442. 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