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620CARO: The Common Anatomy Reference OntologyIn Haendel Melissa, A. Neuhaus, Fabian Osumi-Sutherland, David Mabee, Paula M., Mejino Jr José L. V., Mungall Chris, J. Smith & Barry (eds.), Anatomy Ontologies for Bioinformatics: Principles and Practice, Springer. pp. 327-349. 2008.The Common Anatomy Reference Ontology (CARO) is being developed to facilitate interoperability between existing anatomy ontologies for different species, and will provide a template for building new anatomy ontologies. CARO has a structural axis of classification based on the top-level nodes of the Foundational Model of Anatomy. CARO will complement the developmental process sub-ontology of the GO Biological Process ontology, using it to ensure the coherent treatment of developmental stages, and…Read more
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256The Ontology of Processes and Functions: A Study of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and HealthIn Barry Smith, Anand Kumar & Thomas Bittner (eds.), Basic Formal Ontology for bioinformatics, Ifomis Reports. 2005.The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health provides a classification of human bodily functions, which, while exhibiting non-conformance to many formal ontological principles, provides an insight into which basic functions such a classification should include. Its evaluation is an important first step towards such an adequate ontology of this domain. Presented at the 13th Annual North American WHO Collaborating Center Conference on the ICF, 2007.
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562MetaphysicsIn Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (ed.), Metaphysics: 5 Questions, Automatic Press. pp. 143-158. 2010.Attempts to trace a unifying thread of ontological realism extending through 1. my early writings on Frege, Brentano, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Ingarden and (with Kevin Mulligan and Peter Simons) on truthmakers; 2. work on formal theories of the common-sense world, and on mereotopology, fiat objects, geographical categories, and environments (with David Mark, Roberto Casati, Achille Varzi), to 3. current work on applied ontology in biology and medicine, and on the theory of document acts and on the…Read more
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210Referent tracking for digital rights managementInternational Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies 2 (1): 45-53. 2007.Digital Rights Management (DRM) covers the description, identification, trading, protection, monitoring and tracking of all forms of rights over both tangible and intangible assets. The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) system provides a framework for the persistent identification of entities involved in this domain. Although the system has been very well designed to manage object identifiers, some important questions relating to the creation and assignment of identifiers are left open. The paradi…Read more
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640An Essay on Material NecessityCanadian Journal of Philosophy (sup1): 301-322. 1992.Where Humeans rule out the possibility of material or non-logical necessity, and thus of any associated knowledge a priori, the German legal philosopher Adolf Reinach defends the existence of a wide class of material necessities falling within the domain of what can be known a priori, for example in fields such as color and shape, rational psychology, law and economics. Categories such as promise or claim or obligation are, in Reinach’s view, exist as nodes in a system of necessary relations, so…Read more
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791Per una storia della teoria degli atti linguisticiIn Stefano Besoli & Luca Guidetti (eds.), Il realismo fenomenologico. Sulla filosofia dei circoli di Monaco e Gottinga, Quodlibet. pp. 385-418. 2000.Provides a survey of the development of speech act theory from Aristotle through Reid and Peirce to Edmund Husserl, Anton Marty, Johannes Daubert, Adolf Reinach, and finally to Austin and Searle. A special role is played by Husserl's theory of objectifying acts (meaning, roughly, acts of naming or stating) and of the efforts by his followers to extend this theory to cover phenomena such as questioning and commanding. These efforts culminated in the work of Adolf Reinach, who developed the first …Read more
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450The primacy of place: An investigation in Brentanian ontologyTopoi 8 (1): 43-51. 1989.What follows is an investigation of the ontology of Franz Brentano with special reference to Brentano's later and superficially somewhat peculiar doctrine to the effect that the substances of the material world are three dimensional places. Taken as a whole, Brentano's philosophy is marked by three, not obviously compatible, trait. In the first place, his work is rooted in the metaphysics of Aristotle, above all in Aristotle's substance/accident ontology and in the Aristotelian …Read more
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1693Do mountains exist? Towards an ontology of landformsEnvironment and Planning B (Planning and Design) 30 (3). 2003.Do mountains exist? The answer to this question is surely: yes. In fact, ‘mountain’ is the example of a kind of geographic feature or thing most commonly cited by English speakers (Mark, et al., 1999; Smith and Mark 2001), and this result may hold across many languages and cultures. But whether they are considered as individuals (tokens) or as kinds (types), mountains do not exist in quite the same unequivocal sense as do such prototypical everyday objects as chairs or people.
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274Tracking Referents in Electronic Health RecordsStudies in Health Technology and Informatics 116. 2005.Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are organized around two kinds of statements: those reporting observations made, and those reporting acts performed. In neither case does the record involve any direct reference to what such statements are actually about. They record not: what is happening on the side of the patient, but rather: what is said about what is happening. While the need for a unique patient identifier is generally recognized, we argue that we should now move to an EHR regime in which a…Read more
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1152Development of a Manufacturing Ontology for Functionally Graded MaterialsIn Francesco Furini, Rahul Rai, Barry Smith, Georgio Colombo & Venkat Krovi (eds.), Proceedings of International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE), . 2016.The development of manufacturing technologies for new materials involves the generation of a large and continually evolving volume of information. The analysis, integration and management of such large volumes of data, typically stored in multiple independently developed databases, creates significant challenges for practitioners. There is a critical need especially for open-sharing of data pertaining to engineering design which together with effective decision support tools can enable innovatio…Read more
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689Logic and the SachverhaltThe Monist 72 (1): 52-69. 1989.Those who conceive logic as a science have generally favoured one of two alternative conceptions as to what the subject-matter of this science ought to be. On the one hand is the nowadays somewhat old-fashioned-seeming view of logic as the science of judgment, or of thinking or reasoning activities in general. On the other hand is the view of logic as a science of ideal meanings, 'thoughts', or 'propositions in themselves'. There is, however, a third alternative conception, which enjoyed only a …Read more
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369Toward an Ontological Treatment of Disease and DiagnosisIn Richard H. Scheuermann, Werner Ceusters & Barry Smith (eds.), Toward an Ontological Treatment of Disease and Diagnosis, American Medical Informatics Association. 2009.Many existing biomedical vocabulary standards rest on incomplete, inconsistent or confused accounts of basic terms pertaining to diseases, diagnoses, and clinical phenotypes. Here we outline what we believe to be a logically and biologically coherent framework for the representation of such entities and of the relations between them. We defend a view of disease as involving in every case some physical basis within the organism that bears a disposition toward the execution of pathological process…Read more
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6752Foundations of Gestalt Theory (edited book)Philosophia. 1988.In 1890 Christian von Ehrenfels published his classic paper "Über 'Gestaltqualitäten'", the first systematic investigation of the philosophy and psychology of Gestalt. Ehrenfels thereby issued an important challenge to the psychological atomism that was still predominant in his day. His paper not only exerted a powerful influence on the philosophy of the Meinong school, it also marked the beginning of the Gestalt tradition in psychology, later associated with the work of Wertheimer, Köhler and K…Read more
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224The Ecological Approach to Information ProcessingIn Kristóf Nyíri (ed.), Mobile Learning: Essays on Philosophy, Psychology and Education, Passagen Verlag. pp. 17--24. 2003.Imagine a 5-stone weakling whose brain has been loaded with all the knowledge of a champion tennis player. He goes to serve in his first match – Wham! – His arm falls off. The 5-stone weakling just doesn’t have the bone structure or muscular development to serve that hard. There are, clearly, different types of knowledge/ability/skill, only some of which are a matter of what can be transferred simply by passing signals down a wire from one brain (or computer) to another. Sometimes it is the body…Read more
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485Bodily Systems and the Spatial-Functional Structure of the Human BodyStudies in Health and Technology Informatics 102. 2004.The human body is a system made of systems. The body is divided into bodily systems proper, such as the endocrine and circulatory systems, which are subdivided into many sub-systems at a variety of levels, whereby all systems and subsystems engage in massive causal interaction with each other and with their surrounding environments. Here we offer an explicit definition of bodily system and provide a framework for understanding their causal interactions. Medical sciences provide at best informal …Read more
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353Universal Core Semantic LayerIn Barry Smith, Lowell Vizenor & James Schoening (eds.), Universal Core Semantic Layer, Ceur, Vol. 555. pp. 1-5. 2009.The Universal Core (UCore) is a central element of the National Information Sharing Strategy that is supported by multiple U.S. Federal Government Departments, by the intelligence community, and by a number of other national and international institutions. The goal of the UCore initiative is to foster information sharing by means of an XML schema providing consensus representations for four groups of universally understood terms under the headings who, what, when, and where. We here describe a p…Read more
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394The Environment Ontology: Contextualising biological and biomedical entitiesJournal of Biomedical Semantics 4 (43): 1-9. 2013.As biological and biomedical research increasingly reference the environmental context of the biological entities under study, the need for formalisation and standardisation of environment descriptors is growing. The Environment Ontology (ENVO) is a community-led, open project which seeks to provide an ontology for specifying a wide range of environments relevant to multiple life science disciplines and, through an open participation model, to accommodate the terminological requirements of all t…Read more
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975Handbook of metaphysics and ontology (edited book)Philosophia Verlag. 1991.The Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology reflects the conviction that the history of metaphysics and current work in metaphysics and ontology can each throw valuable light on the other. Thus it is designed to serve both äs a means of making more widely accessible the results of recent scholarship in the history of philosophy, and also äs a unique work of reference in reladon to the metaphysical themes at the centre of much current debate in analyüc philosophy. The work contains more man 450 shor…Read more
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3244John Searle: From speech acts to social realityIn John Searle, Cambridge University Press. pp. 1-33. 2003.We provide an overview of Searle's contributions to speech act theory and the ontology of social reality, focusing on his theory of constitutive rules. In early versions of this theory, Searle proposed that all such rules have the form 'X counts as Y in context C' formula – as for example when Barack Obama (X) counts as President of the United States (Y) in the context of US political affairs. Crucially, the X and the Y terms are here identical. A problem arises for this theory for cases involvi…Read more
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1525The evaluation of ontologies: Toward improved semantic interoperabilityIn Chris Baker & Kei H. Cheung (eds.), Semantic Web: Revolutionizing Knowledge Discovery in the Life Sciences, Springer. pp. 139-158. 2006.Recent years have seen rapid progress in the development of ontologies as semantic models intended to capture and represent aspects of the real world. There is, however, great variation in the quality of ontologies. If ontologies are to become progressively better in the future, more rigorously developed, and more appropriately compared, then a systematic discipline of ontology evaluation must be created to ensure quality of content and methodology. Systematic methods for ontology evaluation wil…Read more
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981Document ActsIn Anita Konzelmann Ziv & Hans Bernhard Schmid (eds.), Institutions, Emotions, and Group Agents, Springer. pp. 19-31. 2013.The theory of document acts is an extension of the more traditional theory of speech acts advanced by Austin and Searle. It is designed to do justice to the ways in which documents can be used to bring about a variety of effects in virtue of the fact that, where speech is evanescent, documents are continuant entities. This means that documents can be preserved in such a way that they can be inspected and modified at successive points in time and grouped together into enduring document complexes.…Read more
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364Ontology with Human Subjects Testing: An Empirical Investigation of Geographic CategoriesAmerican Journal of Economics and Sociology 58 (2). 1998.Ontology, since Aristotle, has been conceived as a sort of highly general physics, a science of the types of entities in reality, of the objects, properties, categories and relations which make up the world. At the same time ontology has been for some two thousand years a speculative enterprise. It has rested methodologically on introspection and on the construction and analysis of elaborate world-models and of abstract formal-ontological theories. In the work of Quine and others this ontologica…Read more
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1729Towards a History of Speech Act TheoryIn Armin Burkhardt (ed.), Speech acts, meaning, and intentions: critical approaches to the philosophy of John R. Searle, W. De Gruyter. pp. 29--61. 1990.That uses of language not only can, but even normally do, have the character of actions was a fact largely unrealised by those engaged in the study of language before the present century, at least in the sense that there was lacking any attempt to come to terms systematically with the action-theoretic peculiarities of language use. Where the action-character of linguistic phenomena was acknowledged, it was normally regarded as a peripheral matter, relating to derivative or nonstandard aspects of…Read more
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373Truth and the visual fieldIn Jean Petitot, Francisco J. Varela, Bernard Pachoud & Jean-Michel Roy (eds.), Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, Stanford University Press. pp. 317-329. 1999.The paper uses the tools of mereotopology (the theory of parts, wholes and boundaries) to work out the implications of certain analogies between the 'ecological psychology' of J. J Gibson and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. It presents an ontological theory of spatial boundaries and of spatially extended entities. By reference to examples from the geographical sphere it is shown that both boundaries and extended entities fall into two broad categories: those which exist independently of our…Read more
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332Endurants and Perdurants in Directly Depicting OntologiesAI Communications 13 (4). 2004.We propose an ontological theory that is powerful enough to describe both complex spatio-temporal processes and the enduring entities that participate therein. For this purpose we introduce the notion a directly depicting ontology. Directly depicting ontologies are based on relatively simple languages and fall into two major categories: ontologies of type SPAN and ontologies of type SNAP. These represent two complementary perspectives on reality and employ distinct though compatible systems of c…Read more
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468An Axiomatisation of Basic Formal Ontology with Projection FunctionsIn Kerry Taylor (ed.), Advances in Ontologies, Proceedings of the Sixth Australasian Ontology Workshop, University of Adelaide. pp. 71-80. 2010.This paper proposes a reformulation of the treatment of boundaries, at parts and aggregates of entities in Basic Formal Ontology. These are currently treated as mutually exclusive, which is inadequate for biological representation since some entities may simultaneously be at parts, boundaries and/or aggregates. We introduce functions which map entities to their boundaries, at parts or aggregations. We make use of time, space and spacetime projection functions which, along the way, allow us to de…Read more
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519SachverhaltIn Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Volume 8, Basel: Schwabe. 1992.Both ‘Sachverhalt’ and ‘state of affairs’ seem to have been derived from the juridical ‘status’ in the sense of 'status rerum' meaning: state or constitution of things. ‘Status’ signifies also in an extended sense ‘the way things stand, the condition or peculiarity of a thing in regard to its circumstances, position, order’. We describe the history of usage of ‘Sachverhalt’ from these beginnings, addressing the role of Goclenius, Lotze, Stumpf, Husserl and Adolf Reinach, whose theory of the rela…Read more
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473Mach und Ehrenfels: Über Gestaltqualitäten und das Problem der AbhängigkeitIn Reinhard Fabian (ed.), Christian von Ehrenfels: Leben und Werk, Rodopi. pp. 85-111. 1986.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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484Against idiosyncrasy in ontology developmentIn Barry Smith & Christopher Welty (eds.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS), Acm Press. pp. 15-26. 2001.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
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30Review of Paul Gochet, Outline of a Nominalist Theory of Propositions (review)Grazer Philosophische Studien 14 (1): 216-217. 1981.
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 |