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
  •  590
    Philosophie, Politik und Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung
    Grazer 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
  •  1124
    Characteristica Universalis
    In 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
  •  478
    Against idiosyncrasy in ontology development
    In B. Bennett & C. Fellbaum (eds.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS), Ios Press. pp. 15-26. 2006.
    The world of ontology development is full of mysteries. Recently, ISO Standard 15926 (“Lifecycle Integration of Process Plant Data Including Oil and Gas Production Facilities”), a data model initially designed to support the integration and handover of large engineering artefacts, has been proposed by its principal custodian for general use as an upper level ontology. As we shall discover, ISO 15926 is, when examined in light of this proposal, marked by a series of quite astonishing defects, whi…Read more
  •  293
    Referent Tracking: The Problem of Negative Findings
    with Werner Ceusters and Peter Elkin
    Studies 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
  •  66
    Surrounding Space
    with Achille C. Varzi
    Theory in Biosciences 121 (2): 139-162. 2002.
    The history of evolution is a history of development from less to more complex organisms. This growth in complexity of organisms goes hand in hand with a concurrent growth in complexity of environments and of organism-environment relations. It is a concern with this latter aspect of evolutionary development that motivates the present paper. We begin by outlining a theory of organism-environment relations. We then show that the theory can be applied to a range of different sorts of cases, both bi…Read more
  •  225
    Il significato della vita: come valurare una civiltà
    In 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
  •  24
    Alexius Meinong, On Objects of Higher Order and Husserl's Phenomenology (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 30 (120): 252. 1980.
  •  271
    A Formal Theory of Substances, Qualities, and Universals
    with Fabian Neuhaus and Pierre Grenon
    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
  •  179
    Wittgensteinian Philosophy and the Culture of the Commentary
    In Rudolf Haller & Johannes Brandl (eds.), Wittgenstein: Towards a Re-Evaluation, Volume 2, Hölder-pichler-tempsky. pp. 247-254. 1990.
    The object of the present paper is the philosophical commentary, a form of literature that once predominated in all major philosophical cultures from classical Greece to Renaissance Italy, but which has more recently fallen into comparative disuse. Commentaries on the writings of German thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Marx and Heidegger have, certainly, kept the form alive to some extent in recent centuries; in the tradition of philosophy that was initiated by Descartes and Locke, however, and whi…Read more
  •  533
    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
  •  736
    Biomedical imaging ontologies: A survey and proposal for future work
    with Sivaram Arabandi, Mathias Brochhausen, Michael Calhoun, Paolo Ciccarese, Scott Doyle, Bernard Gibaud, Ilya Goldberg, Charles E. Kahn Jr, James Overton, John Tomaszewski, and Metin Gurcan
    Journal 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
  •  263
    Vérifacteurs
    Etudes de Philosophie 9 104-138. 2008-2011.
    French translation of "Truth-Makers" (1984). A realist theory of truth for a class of sentence holds that there are entities in virtue of which these sentences are true or false. We call such entities ‘truthmakers’ and contend that those for a wide range of sentences about the real world are moments (dependent particulars). Since moments are unfamiliar we provide a definition and a brief philosophical history, anchoring them in our ontology by showing that they are objects of perception. The co…Read more
  •  265
    On the ontology of functions
    with Stefano Borgo and Riichiro Mizoguchi
    Applied 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.
  •  648
    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
  •  436
    Logic and formal ontology
    Manuscrito 23 (2): 275-323. 2000.
    Revised version of chapter in J. N. Mohanty and W. McKenna (eds.), Husserl’s Phenomenology: A Textbook, Lanham: University Press of America, 1989, 29–67. Logic for Husserl is a science of science, a science of what all sciences have in common in their modes of validation. Thus logic deals with universal laws relating to truth, to deduction, to verification and falsification, and with laws relating to theory as such, and to what makes for theoretical unity, both on the side of the propositions of…Read more
  •  1253
    Joint Doctrine Ontology: A Benchmark for Military Information Systems Interoperability
    with Peter Morosoff, Ron Rudnicki, Jason Bryant, and Robert Farrell
    When 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
  •  373
    From the point of view of Brentano’s philosophy, contemporary philosophy of mind presupposes an over-crude theory of the internal structures of mental acts and states and of the corresponding types of parts, unity and dependence. We here describe Brentano’s own account of the part-whole structures obtaining in the mental sphere, and show how it opens up new possibilities for mereological investigation. One feature of Brentano’s view is that the objects of experience are themselves parts of mind,…Read more
  •  201
    Ontologie des Mesokosmos. Soziale Objekte und Umwelten
    Zeitschrift 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.
  •  379
    A terminological and ontological analysis of the NCI thesaurus
    with Werner Ceusters and Louis Goldberg
    Methods 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
  •  256
    Dieses Buch betritt Neuland. Es ist eine Einführung in das neue Gebiet der angewandten Ontologie, jenem multidisziplinären Arbeitsgebiet, in dem Philosophen gemeinsam mit Informatikern und Vertretern der jeweils thematischen Wissenschaftsbereiche, in unserem Fall mit Biologen und Medizinern, daran arbeiten, wissenschaftliches Wissen informationstechnisch zu repräsentieren. Es zeigt, wie Philosophie eine praktische Anwendung findet, die von zunehmender Wichtigkeit nicht nur in den heutigen Lebens…Read more
  •  2047
    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
  •  996
    Human cognitive acts are directed towards objects extended in space of a wide range of different types. What follows is a new proposal for bringing order into this typological clutter. The theory of spatially extended objects should make room not only for the objects of physics but also for objects at higher levels, including the objects of geography and of related disciplines. It should leave room for different types of boundaries, including both the bona fide boundaries which we find in the ph…Read more
  •  360
    Annotating affective neuroscience data with the Emotion Ontology
    with Janna Hastings, Werner Ceusters, and Kevin Mulligan
    In Janna Hastings, Werner Ceusters, Kevin Mulligan & Barry Smith (eds.), Third International Conference on Biomedical Ontology, Icbo. pp. 1-5. 2012.
    The Emotion Ontology is an ontology covering all aspects of emotional and affective mental functioning. It is being developed following the principles of the OBO Foundry and Ontological Realism. This means that in compiling the ontology, we emphasize the importance of the nature of the entities in reality that the ontology is describing. One of the ways in which realism-based ontologies are being successfully used within biomedical science is in the annotation of scientific research results in pu…Read more
  •  332
    The New European Philosophy
    In János Kristóf Nyíri & Barry Smith (eds.), Philosophy and Political Change in Eastern Europe, Hegeler Institute. pp. 165-170. 1993.
    The paper seeks to indicate ways in which the crude distinction between Anglo-Saxon and Continental philosophy may have to be amended in light of recent developments in Eastern Europe. As is well known, the philosophy of science is to no small part a product of the universities of the Habsburg Empire (in Vienna, Prague, Lemberg/Lwow, etc.). Logic, too, has played a more significant role in Eastern Europe (not least in Poland) than in the philosophical cultures of Germany or France. For these and…Read more
  •  526
    Mereotopology: A theory of parts and boundaries
    Data and Knowledge Engineering 20 (3). 1996.
    The paper is a contribution to formal ontology. It seeks to use topological means in order to derive ontological laws pertaining to the boundaries and interiors of wholes, to relations of contact and connectedness, to the concepts of surface, point, neighbourhood, and so on. The basis of the theory is mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, a theory which is shown to have a number of advantages, for ontological purposes, over standard treatments of topology in set-theoretic terms. One ce…Read more
  •  776
    Against Fantology
    In Johann C. Marek & Maria E. Reicher (eds.), Experience and Analysis, Hpt&öbv. pp. 153-170. 2005.
    The analytical philosophy of the last hundred years has been heavily influenced by a doctrine to the effect that the key to the correct understanding of reality is captured syntactically in the ‘Fa’ (or, in more sophisticated versions, in the ‘Rab’) of standard first order predicate logic. Here ‘F’ stands for what is general in reality and ‘a’ for what is individual. Hence “f(a)ntology”. Because predicate logic has exactly two syntactically different kinds of referring expressions—‘F’, ‘G’, ‘R’,…Read more
  •  497
    Assessing Ontologies: The Question of Human Origins and Its Ethical Significance
    In Edmund Runggaldier, Christian Kanzian & Josef Quitterer (eds.), Persons: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Öbvhpt. pp. 243--259. 2003.
    In their paper “Sixteen Days” Barry Smith and Berit Brogaard try to answer the question: when does a human being begin to exist? In this paper we will address some methodological issues connected with this exercise in ontology. We shall begin by sketching the argument of “Sixteen Days”. We shall then attempt to characterize what is special about the ontological realism of “Sixteen Days” as contrasted to the linguistic constructivism which represents the more dominant current in contemporary anal…Read more
  •  720
    Fiat objects
    Topoi 20 (2): 131-148. 2001.
    Human cognitive acts are directed towards entities of a wide range of different types. What follows is a new proposal for bringing order into this typological clutter. A categorial scheme for the objects of human cognition should be (1) critical and realistic. Cognitive subjects are liable to error, even to systematic error of the sort that is manifested by believers in the Pantheon of Olympian gods. Thus not all putative object-directed acts should be recognized as having objects of their own. …Read more
  •  972
    The Plant Ontology as a Tool for Comparative Plant Anatomy and Genomic Analyses
    with Laurel Cooper, Ramona Walls, Justin Elser, Maria A. Gandolfo, Dennis W. Stevenson, and Others
    Plant and Cell Physiology 54 (2). 2013.
    The Plant Ontology (PO; http://www.plantontology.org/) is a publicly-available, collaborative effort to develop and maintain a controlled, structured vocabulary (“ontology”) of terms to describe plant anatomy, morphology and the stages of plant development. The goals of the PO are to link (annotate) gene expression and phenotype data to plant structures and stages of plant development, using the data model adopted by the Gene Ontology. From its original design covering only rice, maize and Arabi…Read more
  •  414
    Textual Deference
    American Philosophical Quarterly 28 (1). 1991.
    It is a truism that the attitude of deference to the text plays a lesser role in Anglo-Saxon philosophy than in other philosophical traditions. Works of philosophy written in English have, it is true, spawned a massive secondary literature dealing with the ideas, problems or arguments they contain. But they have almost never given rise to works of commentary in the strict sense, a genre which is however a dominant literary form not only in the Confucian, Vedantic, Islamic, Jewish and Scholastic …Read more