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
  •  505
    Framework for a protein ontology
    with Darren A. Natale, Cecilia N. Arighi, Winona Barker, Judith Blake, Ti-Cheng Chang, Zhangzhi Hu, Hongfang Liu, and Cathy H. Wu
    BMC 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
  •  722
    Law and eschatology in Wittgenstein's early thought
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 21 (1-4). 1978.
    The paper investigates the role played by ethical deliberation and ethical judgment in Wittgenstein's early thought in the light of twentieth?century German legal philosophy. In particular the theories of the phenomenologists Adolf Reinach, Wilhelm Schapp, and Gerhart Husserl are singled out, as resting on ontologies which are structurally similar to that of the Tractatus: in each case it is actual and possible Sachverhalte which constitute the prime ontological category. The study of the relati…Read more
  •  693
    The Neurath-Haller Thesis: Austria and the Rise of Scientific Philosophy
    In 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
  •  739
    Strengths and Limitations of Formal Ontologies in the Biomedical Domain
    Electronic 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
  •  276
    Philosophie und biomedizinische Forschung
    with Bert R. E. Klagges
    Allgemeine 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
  •  1621
    The Space Object Ontology
    with Alexander P. Cox, Christopher Nebelecky, Ronald Rudnicki, William Tagliaferri, and John L. Crassidis
    In 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
  •  766
    Diagrams, Documents, and the Meshing of Plans
    In Andras Benedek & Kristof Nyiri (eds.), How To Do Things With Pictures: Skill, Practice, Performance, Peter Lang Edition. pp. 165--179. 2013.
    There are two important ways in which, when dealing with documents, we go beyond the boundaries of linear text. First, by incorporating diagrams into documents, and second, by creating complexes of intermeshed documents which may be extended in space and evolve and grow through time. The thesis of this paper is that such aggregations of documents are today indispensable to practically all complex human achievements from law and finance to orchestral performance and organized warfare. Documents p…Read more
  •  284
    Philosophy and Biomedical Information Systems
    with Bert Klagges
    In Katherine Munn & Barry Smith (eds.), Applied Ontology: An Introduction, Ontos. pp. 17-30. 2008.
    The pathbreaking scientific advances of recent years call for a new philosophical consideration of the fundamental categories of biology and its neighboring disciplines. Above all, the new information technologies used in biomedical research, and the necessity to master the continuously growing flood of data that is associated therewith, demand a profound and systematic reflection on the systematization and classification of biological data. This, however, demands robust theories of basic concep…Read more
  •  187
    Ingarden versus Meinong o logice fikcji
    In 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
  •  449
    Truthmaker Explanations
    In Jean-Maurice Monnoyer (ed.), Metaphysics and Truthmakers, Ontos Verlag. pp. 79-98. 2007.
    This paper is a fresh attempt to articulate the role of a theory of truthmakers. We argue that truthmaker theory constitutes a cornerstone of good methodology in metaphysics, but that a conflation of truthmaker theory with the theory of truth has been responsible for certain excesses associated with truthmaker-based approaches in the recent literature. If truthmaker theory is not a component of a theory of truth, then truthmaker maximalism – the view that every truth has a truthmaker – loses its…Read more
  •  555
    Modelling Principles and Methodologies: Relations in Anatomical Ontologies
    with Fabian Neuhaus
    In 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 ’.
  •  1957
    The Substitution Theory of Art
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 25 (1): 533-557. 1985.
    In perceptual experience we are directed towards objects in a way which establishes a real relation between a mental act and its target. In reading works of fiction we enjoy experiences which manifest certain internal similarities to such relational acts, but which lack objects. The substitution theory of art attempts to provide a reason why we seek out such experiences and the artifacts which they generate. Briefly, we seek out works of art because we enjoy the physiology and the phenomenology …Read more
  •  223
    On the Phases of Reism
    In 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
  •  926
    This paper provides an axiomatic formalization of a theory of foundational relations between three categories of entities: individuals, universals, and collections. We deal with a variety of relations between entities in these categories, including the is-a relation among universals and the part-of relation among individuals as well as cross-category relations such as instance-of, member-of, and partition-of. We show that an adequate understanding of the formal properties of such relations – in …Read more
  •  392
    Bodily Systems and the Modular Structure of the Human Body
    with Igor Papakin and Katherine Munn
    Artificial 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
  •  1825
    On Luck, Responsibility and the Meaning of Life
    Philosophical 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
  •  593
    Applying the Realism-Based Ontology-Versioning Method for Tracking Changes in the Basic Formal Ontology
    with Selja Seppälä and Werner Ceusters
    In P. Garbacz & O. Kutz (eds.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2014), Ios Press. pp. 227-240. 2014.
    Changes in an upper level ontology have obvious conse-quences for the domain ontologies that use it at lower levels. It is therefore crucial to document the changes made between successive versions of ontologies of this kind. We describe and apply a method for tracking, explaining and measuring changes between successive versions of upper level ontologies such as the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). The proposed change-tracking method extends earlier work on Realism-Based Ontology Versioning (RBOV) …Read more
  •  1006
    HL7 RIM: An incoherent standard
    with Werner Ceusters
    Studies 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.
  •  2006
    Basic concepts of formal ontology
    In Nicola Guarino (ed.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems, Ios Press. pp. 19-28. 1998.
    The term ‘formal ontology’ was first used by the philosopher Edmund Husserl in his Logical Investigations to signify the study of those formal structures and relations – above all relations of part and whole – which are exemplified in the subject-matters of the different material sciences. We follow Husserl in presenting the basic concepts of formal ontology as falling into three groups: the theory of part and whole, the theory of dependence, and the theory of boundary, continuity and contact. T…Read more
  •  1879
    Mach and Ehrenfels: The foundations of Gestalt Theory
    In 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
  •  336
    Some Formal Moments of Truth
    In Werner Leinfellner (ed.), Language and Ontology, Hölder-pichler-tempsky / Reidel. pp. 186-90. 1982.
    A preliminary statement of the formal theory of the truthmaker relation advanced in the paper “Truth-makers” (Mulligan, Simons and Smith) in 1984. Correspondence theories of truth have. I give a brief account of some more or less obvious formal characteristics of this almost forgotten basic truthmaker relation. I then attempt to show how this account may be extended to provide elements of a theory of truth which is in keeping with the spirit of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.
  •  481
    Ontologia i analiza logiczna rzeczywistości
    Filozofia 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
  •  382
    Ontological Support for Living Plan Specification, Execution and Evaluation
    with Erik Thomsen, Fred Read, William Duncan, and Tatiana Malyuta
    In Erik Thomsen, Fred Read, William Duncan, Tatiana Malyuta & Barry Smith (eds.), Semantic Technology in Intelligence, Defense and Security (STIDS), CEUR vol. 1304, . pp. 10-17. 2014.
    Maintaining systems of military plans is critical for military effectiveness, but is also challenging. Plans will become obsolete as the world diverges from the assumptions on which they rest. If too many ad hoc changes are made to intermeshed plans, the ensemble may no longer lead to well-synchronized and coordinated operations, resulting in the system of plans becoming itself incoherent. We describe in what follows an Adaptive Planning process that we are developing on behalf of the Air Force …Read more
  •  415
    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.
  •  1193
    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