-
361Ontology 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
-
41Austrian Economics (Routledge Revivals): Historical and Philosophical Background (edited book)Croom Helm / Routledge. 1986.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
-
480Bodily 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
-
391The 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
-
1Interdisciplinary Ontology, Vol. 3: Proceedings of the Third Interdisciplinary Ontology Meeting (edited book)Keio University Press. 2010.
-
3200John 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
-
408The Role of Foundational Relations in the Alignment of Biomedical OntologiesIn 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
-
1517The 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
-
312LinkSuite™: Software Tools for Formally Robust Ontology-Based Data and Information IntegrationIn 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
-
1725Towards 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
-
329Endurants 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
-
508SachverhaltIn 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
-
608The metaphysics of real estateTopoi 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
-
470Mach und Ehrenfels: Über Gestaltqualitäten und das Problem der AbhängigkeitIn R. 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
-
877Ontologies as Integrative Tools for Plant ScienceAmerican 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
-
30Review of Paul Gochet, Outline of a Nominalist Theory of Propositions (review)Grazer Philosophische Studien 14 (1): 216-217. 1981.
-
2043Function, role and disposition in Basic Formal OntologyProceedings 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
-
773Applied ontology: A new discipline is bornPhilosophy Today 12 (29): 5-6. 1998.The discipline of applied ethics already has a certain familiarity in the Anglo-Saxon world, above all through the work of Peter Singer. Applied ethics uses the tools of moral philosophy to resolve practical problems of the sort which arise, for example, in the running of hospitals. In the University at Buffalo (New York) there was organized on April 24-25 1998 the world's first conference on a new, sister discipline, the discipline of applied ontology. Applied ontologists seek to apply ontolog…Read more
-
518A science of topography: Bridging the qualitative-quantitative divideIn David M. Mark & Barry Smith (eds.), Geographic Information Science and Mountain Geomorphology, Chichester, England: Springer-praxis. pp. 75--100. 2004.The shape of the Earth's surface, its topography, is a fundamental dimension of the environment, shaping or mediating many other environmental flows or functions. But there is a major divergence in the way that topography is conceptualized in different domains. Topographic cartographers, information scientists, geomorphologists and environmental modelers typically conceptualize topographic variability as a continuous field of elevations or as some discrete approximation to such a field. Pilots, …Read more
-
5711Gestalt theory: An essay in philosophyIn Foundations of Gestalt Theory, Philosophia Verlag. pp. 11-81. 1988.The Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels published his essay "On 'Gestalt Qualities'" in 1890. The essay initiated a current of thought which enjoyed a powerful position in the philosophy and psychology of the first half of this century and has more recently enjoyed a minor resurgence of interest in the area of cognitive science, above all in criticisms of the so-called 'strong programme' in artificial intelligence. The theory of Gestalt is of course associated most…Read more
-
701The cornucopia of formal-ontological relationsDialectica 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.
-
366Functional anatomy: A taxonomic proposalActa Biotheoretica 53 (3): 153-166. 2005.It is argued that medical science requires a classificatory system that (a) puts functions in the taxonomic center and (b) does justice ontologically to the difference between the processes which are the realizations of functions and the objects which are their bearers. We propose formulae for constructing such a system and describe some of its benefits. The arguments are general enough to be of interest to all the life sciences.
-
1073True gridIn 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
-
470Ontology and the logistic analysis of realityIn Nicola Guarino & Roberto Poli (eds.), Proceedings of the International Workshop on Formal Ontology in Conceptual Analysis and Knowledge Representation, Italian National Research Council. pp. 51-68. 1993.I shall attempt in what follows to show how mereology, taken together with certain topological notions, can yield the basis for future investigations in formal ontology. I shall attempt to show also how the mereological framework here advanced can allow the direct and natural formulation of a series of theses – for example pertaining to the concept of boundary – which can be formulated only indirectly (if at all) in set-theoretic terms.
Barry Smith
University at Buffalo
National Center for Ontological Research
-
University at BuffaloDepartment of Philosophy
Biomedical Informatics
Neurology
Computer Science and EngineeringDistinguished Professor, Julian Park Chair -
National Center for Ontological ResearchAdministrator
-
APA Eastern Division
Buffalo, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Ontology |
Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence |
Philosophy of Biology |