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1207Husserl’s Theory of Meaning and ReferenceIn L. Haaparanta (ed.), Mind, Meaning and Mathematics: Essays on the Philosophy of Husserl and Frege, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 163-183. 1994.This paper is a contribution to the historical roots of the analytical tradition. As Michael Dummett points out in his Origins of Analytic Philosophy, many tendencies in Central European thought contributed to the early development of analytic philosophy. Dummett himself concentrates on just one aspect of this historical complex, namely on the relationship between the theories of meaning and reference developed by Frege and by Husserl in the years around the turn of the century. It is to this sp…Read more
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757Infectious Disease OntologyIn Infectious Disease Informatics, Springer New York. pp. 373-395. 2009.Technological developments have resulted in tremendous increases in the volume and diversity of the data and information that must be processed in the course of biomedical and clinical research and practice. Researchers are at the same time under ever greater pressure to share data and to take steps to ensure that data resources are interoperable. The use of ontologies to annotate data has proven successful in supporting these goals and in providing new possibilities for the automated processing…Read more
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249What follows is a summary of basic principles pertaining to the definitions used in constructing an ontology. A definition is a statement of necessary and sufficient conditions. What this means in the simplest case can be understood as follows. To say that ɸ‐ing is a necessary condition for being an A is just another way of saying that every A ɸ’s; to say that ɸ‐ing is a sufficient condition for being an A is just another way of saying that everything that ɸ’s is an A. The goal in writing a defi…Read more
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Introduction: A New Definition of Liberal EducationIn Barry Smith (ed.), Liberal Education in a Knowledge Society, Open Court. pp. 1-9. 2002.
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173Implementing clinical guidelines in an organizational setupIn Kumar Anand, Smith Barry, Stefanelli Mario, Quaglini Silvana & Piazza Matteo (eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Model-Based and Qualitative Reasoning in Biomedicine, AIME ., . pp. 39-44. 2003.Outcomes research in healthcare has been a topic much addressed in recent years. Efforts in this direction have been supplemented by work in the areas of guidelines for clinical practice and computer-interpretable workflow and careflow models.In what follows we present the outlines of a framework for understanding the relations between organizations, guidelines, individual patients and patient-related functions. The derived framework provides a means to extract the knowledge contained in the gui…Read more
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1233Functions in Basic Formal OntologyApplied ontology 11 (2): 103-128. 2016.The notion of function is indispensable to our understanding of distinctions such as that between being broken and being in working order (for artifacts) and between being diseased and being healthy (for organisms). A clear account of the ontology of functions and functioning is thus an important desideratum for any top-level ontology intended for application to domains such as engineering or medicine. The benefit of using top-level ontologies in applied ontology can only be realized when each o…Read more
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615Formal Ontology for Natural Language Processing and the Integration of Biomedical DatabasesInternational Journal of Medical Informatics 75 (3-4): 224-231. 2005.The central hypothesis of the collaboration between Language and Computing (L&C) and the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) is that the methodology and conceptual rigor of a philosophically inspired formal ontology greatly benefits application ontologies. To this end r®, L&C’s ontology, which is designed to integrate and reason across various external databases simultaneously, has been submitted to the conceptual demands of IFOMIS’s Basic Formal Ontology (BFO)…Read more
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476GOL: A general ontological languageIn Chris Welty & Barry Smith (eds.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS), Acm Press. pp. 34-46. 2001.Every domain-specific ontology must use as a framework some upper-level ontology which describes the most general, domain-independent categories of reality. In the present paper we sketch a new type of upper-level ontology, which is intended to be the basis of a knowledge modelling language GOL (for: 'General Ontological Language'). It turns out that the upper- level ontology underlying standard modelling languages such as KIF, F-Logic and CycL is restricted to the ontology of sets. Set theory h…Read more
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202Every domain-specific ontology must use as a framework some upper-level ontology which describes the most general domain-independent categories of reality. In the present paper we sketch a new type of upper-level ontology, and we outline an associated knowledge modelling language called GOL – for: General Ontological Language. It turns out that the upper-level ontology underlying well-known standard modelling languages such as KIF, F-Logic and CycL is restricted to the ontology of sets. In a set…Read more
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300Ontology as a branch of philosophy is the science of what is, of the kinds and structures of objects, properties, events, processes and relations in every area of reality. ‘Ontology’ is often used by philosophers as a synonym for ‘metaphysics’ (literally: ‘what comes after the Physics’), a term which was used by early students of Aristotle to refer to what Aristotle himself called ‘first philosophy’. The term ‘ontology’ (or ontologia) was itself coined in 1613, independently, by two philosophers…Read more
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198Enhancing GO for the sake of clinical bioinformaticsProceedings of the Bio-Ontologies Workshop , Glasgow 133. 2004.Recent work on the quality assurance of the Gene Ontology (GO, Gene Ontology Consortium 2004) from the perspective of both linguistic and ontological organization has made it clear that GO lacks the kind of formalism needed to support logic-based reasoning. At the same time it is no less clear that GO has proven itself to be an excellent terminological resource that can serve to combine together a variety of biomedical database and information systems. Given the strengths of GO, it is worth inve…Read more
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307Environmental MetaphysicsIn Uwe A. Meixner Meixner (ed.), Metaphysics in the Post-Metaphysical Age. Proceedings of the 22nd International Wittgenstein-Symposium, Hölder-pichler-tempsky. pp. 231-242. 2001.We propose the beginnings of a general theory of environments, of the parts or regions of space in which organisms live and move. We draw on two sources: on the one hand on recent work on the ontology of space; and on the other hand on work by ecological scientists on concepts such as territory, habitat, and niche. An environment is in first approximation a volume of space; it is a specific habitat, location, or site that is suitable or adequate for given purposes (of foraging, resting, hunti…Read more
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232Dependence relationships between Gene Ontology terms based on TIGR gene product annotationsProceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Computational Terminology 2004 31-38. 2004.The Gene Ontology is an important tool for the representation and processing of information about gene products and functions. It provides controlled vocabularies for the designations of cellular components, molecular functions, and biological processes used in the annotation of genes and gene products. These constitute three separate ontologies, of cellular components), molecular functions and biological processes, respectively. The question we address here is: how are the terms in these three …Read more
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231Ontological realism aims at the development of high quality ontologies that faithfully represent what is general in reality and to use these ontologies to render heterogeneous data collections comparable. To achieve this second goal for clinical research datasets presupposes not merely (1) that the requisite ontologies already exist, but also (2) that the datasets in question are faithful to reality in the dual sense that (a) they denote only particulars and relationships between particulars tha…Read more
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354Clonal complexes in biomedical ontologiesIn Barry Smith (ed.), ICBO 2009: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Biomedical Ontology, Ncor. pp. 168. 2009.An accurate classification of bacteria is essential for the proper identification of patient infections and subsequent treatment decisions. Multi-Locus Sequence Typing (MLST) is a genetic technique for bacterial classification. MLST classifications are used to cluster bacteria into clonal complexes. Importantly, clonal complexes can serve as a biological species concept for bacteria, facilitating an otherwise difficult taxonomic classification. In this paper, we argue for the inclusion of terms …Read more
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765Common senseIn Barry Smith & David Woodruff Smith (eds.), The Cambridge companion to Husserl, Cambridge University Press. pp. 394-437. 1995.Can there be a theory-free experience? And what would be the object of such an experience. Drawing on ideas set out by Husserl in the “Crisis” and in the second book of his “Ideas”, the paper presents answers to these questions in such a way as to provide a systematic survey of the content and ontology of common sense. In the second part of the paper Husserl’s ideas on the relationship between the common-sense world (what he called the ‘life-world’) and the world of physical theory are subjected…Read more
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171Command and Control OntologyInternational Journal of Intelligent Defence Support Systems (Special Issue) 4 (3). 2011.Intelligent defence support systems are confronted with the need to manage ever-increasing floods of data in a way that raises significant challenges because the data are described and presented using different terminologies and formats. How, on this basis, is it possible to reach a common understanding of the information content of these data among people and software agents? How is it possible to ensure that domain knowledge is reused in consistent fashion in a way that makes this information …Read more
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253Clinical ontologies interfacing the real worldIn Schulz Stefan, Stenzhorn Holger, Boeker Martin, Klar Rüdiger & Smith Barry (eds.), Third International Conference on Semantic Technologies (i-semantics 2007), Graz, Austria, . 2007.The desideratum of semantic interoperability has been intensively discussed in medical informatics circles in recent years. Originally, experts assumed that this issue could be sufficiently addressed by insisting simply on the application of shared clinical terminologies or clinical information models. However, the use of the term ‘ontology’ has been steadily increasing more recently. We discuss criteria for distinguishing clinical ontologies from clinical terminologies and information models. T…Read more
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238Biomedizinische Ontologien für die PraxisEuropean Journal for Biomedical Informatics 1. 2009.Hintergrund: Biomedizinische Ontologien existieren unter anderem zur Integration von klinischen und experimentellen Daten. Um dies zu erreichen ist es erforderlich, dass die fraglichen Ontologien von einer großen Zahl von Benutzern zur Annotation von Daten verwendet werden. Wie können Ontologien das erforderliche Maß an Benutzerfreundlichkeit, Zuverlässigkeit, Kosteneffektivität und Domänenabdeckung erreichen, um weitreichende Akzeptanz herbeizuführen? Material und Methoden: Wir konzentrieren un…Read more
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345Bioportal: Ontologies and integrated data resources at the click of the mouseIn Whetzel Patricia L., Shah Nigam H., Noy Natalya F., Benjamin Dai, Michael Dorf, Nicholas Griffith, Clement Jonquet, Cherie Youn, Chris Callendar, Adrien Coulet, Smith Barry, Chute Chris & Musen Mark (eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Biomedical Ontology, Buffalo, NY, . 2011.BioPortal is a Web portal that provides access to a library of biomedical ontologies and terminologies developed in OWL, RDF(S), OBO format, Protégé frames, and Rich Release Format. BioPortal functionality, driven by a service-oriented architecture, includes the ability to browse, search and visualize ontologies (Figure 1). The Web interface also facilitates community-based participation in the evaluation and evolution of ontology content.
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181Biomedical Terminologies and Ontologies: Enabling Biomedical Semantic Interoperability and Standards in EuropeIn Bernard de Bono, Mathias Brochhausen, Sybo Dijkstra, Dipak Kalra, Stephan Keifer & Barry Smith (eds.), European Large-Scale Action on Electronic Health, . 2009.In the management of biomedical data, vocabularies such as ontologies and terminologies (O/Ts) are used for (i) domain knowledge representation and (ii) interoperability. The knowledge representation role supports the automated reasoning on, and analysis of, data annotated with O/Ts. At an interoperability level, the use of a communal vocabulary standard for a particular domain is essential for large data repositories and information management systems to communicate consistently with one other.…Read more
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340Applications of the ACGT Master Ontology on CancerIn R. Meersman & P. Herrero (eds.), Proceedings of 4th International IFIP Workshop On Semantic Web and Web Semantics (OTM 2008: Workshops), LNCS 5333, . 2008.In this paper we present applications of the ACGT Master Ontology (MO) which is a new terminology resource for a transnational network providing data exchange in oncology, emphasizing the integration of both clinical and molecular data. The development of a new ontology was necessary due to problems with existing biomedical ontologies in oncology. The ACGT MO is a test case for the application of best practices in ontology development. This paper provides an overview of the application of the on…Read more
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164An ontology-based methodology for the migration of biomedical terminologies to electronic health recordsIn Smith Barry & Ceusters Werner (eds.), Proceedings of AMIA Symposium 2005, Washington DC,, Amia. 2005.Biomedical terminologies are focused on what is general, Electronic Health Records (EHRs) on what is particular, and it is commonly assumed that the step from the one to the other is unproblematic. We argue that this is not so, and that, if the EHR of the future is to fulfill its promise, then the foundations of both EHR architectures and biomedical terminologies need to be reconceived. We accordingly describe a new framework for the treatment of both generals and particulars in biomedical infor…Read more
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233Adolf Reinach e la fondazione della fenomenologia realistica. Prima parte: Nomi e oggettiParadigmi 5 (14): 229-241. 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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312Adolf Reinach e la fondazione della fenomenologia realistica. Seconda parte: Giudizi e stati di coseParadigmi 5 (15): 485-507. 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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179An evolutionary approach to the representation of adverse eventsStudies in Health Technology and Informatics 150 537-541. 2009.One way to detect, monitor and prevent adverse events with the help of Information Technology is by using ontologies capable of representing three levels of reality: what is the case, what is believed about reality, and what is represented. We report on how Basic Formal Ontology and Referent Tracking exhibit this capability and how they are used to develop an adverse event ontology and related data annotation scheme for the European ReMINE project.
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658Adolf Reinach: An Intellectual BiographyIn Kevin Mulligan (ed.), Speech Act and Sachverhalt: Reinach and the Foundations of Realist Phenomenology, Reidel. pp. 1-27. 1987.The essay provides an account of the development of Reinach’s philosophy of “Sachverhalte” (states of affairs) and on problems in the philosophy of law, leading up to his discovery of the theory of speech acts in 1913. Reinach’s relations to Edmund Husserl and to the Munich phenomenologists are also dealt with.
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315An evolutionary approach to realism-based adverse event representationsMethods of Information in Medicine 50 (1): 62-73. 2011.One way to detect, monitor and prevent adverse events with the help of Information Technology is by using ontologies capable of representing three levels of reality: what is the case, what is believed about reality, and what is represented. We report on how Basic Formal Ontology and Referent Tracking exhibit this capability and how they are used to develop an adverse event ontology and related data annotation scheme for the European ReMINE project.
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217A unified framework for building ontological theories with application and testing in the field of clinical trialsIn IFOMIS Reports, University of Leipzig. 2001.The objective of this research programme is to contribute to the establishment of the emerging science of Formal Ontology in Information Systems via a collaborative project involving researchers from a range of disciplines including philosophy, logic, computer science, linguistics, and the medical sciences. The researchers will work together on the construction of a unified formal ontology, which means: a general framework for the construction of ontological theories in specific domains. The f…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 |