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
  •  1085
    True grid
    In 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
  •  467
    German philosophy: Language and style
    Topoi 10 (2): 155-161. 1991.
    The remarks which follow are intended to address a certain apparent asymmetry as between German and Anglo-Saxon philosophy. Put most simply, it is clear to every philosopher moving backwards and forwards between the two languages that the translation of an Anglo-Saxophone philosophical text into German is in general a much easier task than is the translation of a German philosophical text into English. The hypothesis suggests itself immediately that this is so because English philosophical writ…Read more
  •  2061
    Function, role and disposition in Basic Formal Ontology
    with Robert Arp
    Proceedings 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
  •  284
    Edmund Husserl: Briefwechsel (Husserliana Dokumente III). (review)
    Husserl Studies 12 (1): 98-104. 1995.
    This edition of Husserl's correspondence comprises 10 volumes. Its philosophical core is contained in the first four volumes, which correspond to the four phases of Husserl's philosophical career: as follower of Brentano, as mentor of the realist phenomenologists in Munich (the founders of the 'phenomenological movement'), and as professor, successively, in Göttingen and Freiburg. The remaining five volumes pertain to HusserI's correspondence with philosophers and other scholars outside the inne…Read more
  •  439
    L’Autriche et la naissance de la philosophie scientifique
    Actes de la Recherche En Sciences Sociales 109 (1). 1995.
    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
  •  1092
    The Ontology of Fields (edited book)
    with Donna Peuquet and Berit O. Brogaard
    National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis. 1998.
    In the specific case of geography, the real world consists on the one hand of physical geographic features (bona fide objects) and on the other hand of various fiat objects, for example legal and administrative objects, including parcels of real estate, areas of given soil types, census tracts, and so on. It contains in addition the beliefs and actions of human beings directed towards these objects (for example, the actions of those who work in land registries or in census bureaux), and the rela…Read more
  •  678
    Definitions in ontologies
    with Selja Seppälä, Alan Ruttenberg, and Yonatan Schreiber
    Cahiers de Lexicologie 109 (2). 2016.
    Definitions vary according to context of use and target audience. They must be made relevant for each context to fulfill their cognitive and linguistic goals. This involves adapting their logical structure, type of content, and form to each context of use. We examine from these perspectives the case of definitions in ontologies.
  •  477
    Toward a Realistic Science of Environments
    Ecological Psychology 21 (2): 121-130. 2009.
    The perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson embraces a radically externalistic view of mind and action. We have, for Gibson, not a Cartesian mind or soul, with its interior theater of contents and the consequent problem of explaining how this mind or soul and its psychological environment can succeed in grasping physical objects external to itself. Rather, we have a perceiving, acting organism, whose perceptions and actions are always already tuned to the parts and moments, the things and surfaces,…Read more
  •  1204
    Real Estate: Foundations of the Ontology of Property
    In Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Erik Stubjkaer & Christoph Schlieder (eds.), The Ontology and Modelling of Real Estate Transactions, Ashgate. pp. 51-67. 2003.
    Suppose you own a garden-variety object such as a hat or a shirt. Your property right then follows the ageold saw according to which possession is nine-tenths of the law. That is, your possession of a shirt constitutes a strong presumption in favor of your ownership of the shirt. In the case of land, however, this is not the case. Here possession is not only not a strong presumption in favor of ownership; it is not even clear what possession is. Possessing a thing like a hat or a shirt is a rath…Read more
  •  1111
    Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology (edited book)
    Philosophia Verlag. 1982.
    A collection of material on Husserl's Logical Investigations, and specifically on Husserl's formal theory of parts, wholes and dependence and its influence in ontology, logic and psychology. Includes translations of classic works by Adolf Reinach and Eugenie Ginsberg, as well as original contributions by Wolfgang Künne, Kevin Mulligan, Gilbert Null, Barry Smith, Peter M. Simons, Roger A. Simons and Dallas Willard. Documents work on Husserl's ontology arising out of early meetings of the Seminar…Read more
  •  166
    Deferenza testuale
    Divus Thomas 24 (3): 92-116. 1999.
    Works of philosophy written in English have spawned a massive secondary literature dealing with ideas, problems or arguments. 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 traditions, but also in relation to more recent German-language philosophy. Yet Anglo-Saxon philosophers have themselves embraced the commentary form when dealing with Gree…Read more
  •  505
    Weininger und Wittgenstein
    Teoria 2. 1984.
    The paper [which is in German] seeks to show how Weininger’s interpretations of Kant and Schopenhauer help us to understand some of the peculiar reflections on the will, on happiness and unhappiness, and on the problems of life, which are to be found in Wittgenstein's Notebooks. It seeks to explain, above all, why Wittgenstein should wish to reject the basic ethical axiom of “love thy neighbor.” There follows a sketch of one possible Kantian interpretation of the Tractatus along Weiningerian lin…Read more
  •  2576
    Knowing How vs. Knowing That
    In J. C. Nyíri & Barry Smith (eds.), Practical Knowledge: Outlines of a Theory of Traditions and Skills, Croom Helm. pp. 1-16. 1988.
    A sketch of the history of the opposition between propositional and practical knowledge is followed by a brief account of the relevant ideas of Merleau-Ponty, Polanyi, and H. and S. Dreyfus (on expertise and artificial intelligence). The paper concludes with a discussion of the work of Ryle on the notion of a ‘discipline’, drawing implications for a theory of traditions.
  •  651
    Basic Formal Ontology for bioinformatics
    with Anand Kumar and Thomas Bittner
    IFOMIS Reports. 2005.
    Two senses of ‘ontology’ can be distinguished in the current literature. First is the sense favored by information scientists, who view ontologies as software implementations designed to capture in some formal way the consensus conceptualization shared by those working on information systems or databases in a given domain. [Gruber 1993] Second is the sense favored by philosophers, who regard ontologies as theories of different types of entities (objects, processes, relations, functions) [Smith…Read more
  •  417
    Theories of Judgment
    with Artur Rojszczak
    In Thomas Baldwin (ed.), The Cambridge history of philosophy, 1870-1945, Cambridge University Press. pp. 157--173. 2003.
    The dominant theory of judgment in 1870 was one or other variety of combination theory: the act of judgment is an act of combining concepts or ideas in the mind of the judging subject. In the decades to follow a succession of alternative theories arose to address defects in the combination theory, starting with Bolzano’s theory of propositions in themselves, Brentano’s theory of judgment as affirmation or denial of existence, theories distinguishing judgment act from judgment content advanced by…Read more
  •  210
    Referent tracking for digital rights management
    with Werner Ceusters
    International 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
  •  306
    Practices of Art
    In J. C. Nyíri & Barry Smith (eds.), Practical Knowledge: Outlines of a Theory of Traditions and Skills, Croom Helm. pp. 172-209. 1988.
    Starting out from the ontology of human work set out by Marx in Das Kapital, the paper seeks to analyse the relations between the artist and his actions and aims, the work of art he produces, and the audience for this work. The paper concludes with a discussion of the problem of creativity in the arts, drawing on ideas of Roman Ingarden and other phenomenologists.
  •  10
    Ludwig Landgrebe, The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Six Essays (review)
    History and Philosophy of Logic 4 (1): 111. 1983.
  •  1161
    Classifying Processes: An Essay in Applied Ontology
    Ratio 25 (4): 463-488. 2012.
    We begin by describing recent developments in the burgeoning discipline of applied ontology, focusing especially on the ways ontologies are providing a means for the consistent representation of scientific data. We then introduce Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), a top-level ontology that is serving as domain-neutral framework for the development of lower level ontologies in many specialist disciplines, above all in biology and medicine. BFO is a bicategorial ontology, embracing both three-dimensiona…Read more
  •  526
    The structures of the common-sense world
    Acta Philosophica Fennica 58. 1995.
    While contemporary philosophers have devoted vast amounts of attention to the language we use in describing and finding our way about the world of everyday experience, they have, with few exceptions, refused to see this world itself as a fitting object of theoretical concern. In what follows I shall seek to show how the commonsensical world might be treated ontologically as an object of investigation in its own right. At the same time I shall seek to establish how such a treatment might help us …Read more
  •  427
    Biomarkers in the Ontology for General Medical Science
    with Werner Ceusters
    In Ronald Cornet (ed.), Digital Healthcare Empowering Europeans, Ios Press. pp. 155-159. 2015.
    Based on the Ontology for General Medical Science, we propose definitions for biomarkers of various types of. These definitions provide not only a complete formal representation of what biomarkers are according to the Institute of Medicine (IOM), but also remove the ambiguities and inconsistencies encountered in the documentation provided by the IOM.
  •  266
    It
    In Rudolf Haller & Wolfgang Grassl (eds.), Language, Logic and Philosophy, Reidel. 1980.
    A brief study of the logical, linguistic, psychological and ontological problem of ‘impersonalia’, which is to say of assertions such as ‘it’s raining’ or ‘es blitzt’ which seem to have no subject. Such assertions cause problems not only for defenders of traditional subject-predicate views of assertive sentences, but also for those, such as Frege, who defended a view in terms of functions and arguments.
  •  412
    Standard theories in mereotopology focus on relations of parthood and connection among spatial or spatio-temporal regions. Objects or processes which might be located in such regions are not normally directly treated in such theories. At best, they are simulated via appeal to distributions of attributes across the regions occupied or by functions from times to regions. The present paper offers a richer framework, in which it is possible to represent directly the relations between entities of var…Read more
  •  671
    The National Center for Biomedical Ontology
    with Mark A. Musen, Natalya F. Noy, Nigam H. Shah, Patricia L. Whetzel, Christopher G. Chute, and Margaret-Anne Story
    Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 19 (2): 190-195. 2012.
    The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is now in its seventh year. The goals of this National Center for Biomedical Computing are to: create and maintain a repository of biomedical ontologies and terminologies; build tools and web services to enable the use of ontologies and terminologies in clinical and translational research; educate their trainees and the scientific community broadly about biomedical ontology and ontology-based technology and best practices; and collaborate with a variet…Read more
  •  756
    Ontological realism: A methodology for coordinated evolution of scientific ontologies
    with Werner Ceusters
    Applied ontology 5 (3): 139-188. 2010.
    Since 2002 we have been testing and refining a methodology for ontology development that is now being used by multiple groups of researchers in different life science domains. Gary Merrill, in a recent paper in this journal, describes some of the reasons why this methodology has been found attractive by researchers in the biological and biomedical sciences. At the same time he assails the methodology on philosophical grounds, focusing specifically on our recommendation that ontologies developed fo…Read more
  •  1281
    Formal ontology, common sense, and cognitive science
    International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 43 (5-6). 1995.
    Common sense is on the one hand a certain set of processes of natural cognition - of speaking, reasoning, seeing, and so on. On the other hand common sense is a system of beliefs (of folk physics, folk psychology and so on). Over against both of these is the world of common sense, the world of objects to which the processes of natural cognition and the corresponding belief-contents standardly relate. What are the structures of this world? How does the scientific treatment of this world relate to…Read more
  •  18
    See revised version in Barry Smith, Austrian Philosophy, chapter 4; available online at: http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/book/austrian_philosophy/
  •  450
    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
  •  337
    Investigating Subsumption in SNOMED CT: An Exploration into Large Description Logic-Based Biomedical Terminologies
    with Olivier Bodenreider, Anand Kumar, and Anita Burgun
    Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 39 (3): 183-195. 2007.
    Formalisms based on one or other flavor of Description Logic (DL) are sometimes put forward as helping to ensure that terminologies and controlled vocabularies comply with sound ontological principles. The objective of this paper is to study the degree to which one DL-based biomedical terminology (SNOMED CT) does indeed comply with such principles. We defined seven ontological principles (for example: each class must have at least one parent, each class must differ from its parent) and examined …Read more
  •  337
    Husserlian Ecology
    Human Ontology (Kyoto) 7 9-24. 2001.
    If mind is a creature of adaptation, then our standard theories of intentionality and of mental representation are in need of considerable revision. For such theories, deriving under Cartesian inspiration from the work of Brentano, Husserl and their followers, are context-free. They conceive the subject of mental experience in isolation from any surrounding physico-biological environment. Husserl sought in his later writings to find room for the surrounding world of human practical experience, a…Read more