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
  •  564
    Granular Partitions and Vagueness
    In Barry Smith & Christopher Welty (eds.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS), Acm Press. pp. 309-320. 2001.
    There are some who defend a view of vagueness according to which there are intrinsically vague objects or attributes in reality. Here, in contrast, we defend a view of vagueness as a semantic property of names and predicates. All entities are crisp, on this view, but there are, for each vague name, multiple portions of reality that are equally good candidates for being its referent, and, for each vague predicate, multiple classes of objects that are equally good candidates for being its extensio…Read more
  •  3357
    Visceral Values: Aurel Kolnai on Disgust
    In Carolyn Korsmeyer & Barry Smith (eds.), Visceral Values: Aurel Kolnai on Disgust, Open Court Publishing Company. pp. 1-23. 2004.
    In 1929 when Aurel Kolnai published his essay “On Disgust” in Husserl's ]ahrbuch he could truly assert that disgust was a "sorely neglected" topic. Now, however, this situation is changing as philosophers, psychologists, and historians of culture are turning their attention not only to emotions in general but more specifically to the large and disturbing set of aversive emotions, including disgust. We here provide an account of Kolnai’s contribution to the study of the phenomenon of disgust, of …Read more
  •  304
    On carcinomas and other pathological entities
    with Anand Kumar, Werner Ceusters, and Cornelius Rosse
    Comparative and Functional Genomics 6 (7/8). 2005.
    Tumors, abscesses, cysts, scars, fractures are familiar types of what we shall call pathological continuant entities. The instances of such types exist always in or on anatomical structures, which thereby become transformed into pathological anatomical structures of corresponding types: a fractured tibia, a blistered thumb, a carcinomatous colon. In previous work on biomedical ontologies we showed how the provision of formal definitions for relations such as is_a, part_of and transform…Read more
  •  3392
    Beyond concepts: Ontology as reality representation
    In Barry Smith & Christopher Welty (eds.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS), Acm Press. pp. 1-12. 2001.
    The present essay is devoted to the application of ontology in support of research in the natural sciences. It defends the thesis that ontologies developed for such purposes should be understood as having as their subject matter, not concepts, but rather the universals and particulars which exist in reality and are captured in scientific laws. We outline the benefits of a view along these lines by showing how it yields rigorous formal definitions of the foundational relations used in many influe…Read more
  •  340
    We present a novel methodology for calculating the improvements obtained in successive versions of biomedical ontologies. The theory takes into account changes both in reality itself and in our understanding of this reality. The successful application of the theory rests on the willingness of ontology authors to document changes they make by following a number of simple rules. The theory provides a pathway by which ontology authoring can become a science rather than an art, following principles …Read more
  •  224
    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
  •  492
    The Unified Medical Language System and the Gene Ontology: Some critical reflections
    with Anand Kumar
    In A. Günter, R. Kruse & B. Neumann (eds.), KI 2003: Advances in Artificial Intelligence, Springer. pp. 135-148. 2003.
    The Unified Medical Language System and the Gene Ontology are among the most widely used terminology resources in the biomedical domain. However, when we evaluate them in the light of simple principles for wellconstructed ontologies we find a number of characteristic inadequacies. Employing the theory of granular partitions, a new approach to the understanding of ontologies and of the relationships ontologies bear to instances in reality, we provide an application of this theory in relation to a…Read more
  •  338
    Permanent generic relatedness and silent change
    with Niels Grewe and Ludger Jansen
    In Maureen Donnelly & Giancarlo Guizzardi (eds.), Formal Ontology and Information Systems, Ios. pp. 1-5. 2012.
    Given the assertion of a relation between two types, like: “Epidermis has part some Keratinocyte”, we define silent change as any kind of change of the instance-relata of the relation in question that does not change the truth-value of the respective type-level assertion. Such assertions are notoriously difficult to model in OWL 2. To address this problem, we distinguish different modes of type-level relatedness giving rise to this problem and describe a conservative extension to the BFO top-le…Read more
  •  236
    Les objets sociaux
    Philosophiques 26 (2): 315-347. 1999.
    One reason for the renewed interest in Austrian philosophy, and especially in the work of Brentano and his followers, turns on the fact that analytic philosophers have become once again interested in the traditional problems of metaphysics. It was Brentano, Husserl, and the philosophers and psychologists whom they influenced, who drew attention to the thorny problem of intentionality, the problem of giving an account of the relation between acts and objects or, more generally, between the psycho…Read more
  •  199
    Where some have attempted to apply cognitive methods to the study of geography, the present paper is designed to serve as a starting point for applying methods of geographic ontology to the phenomena of cognition. Agglomerations are aggregates of entities that are dispersed through space on geographic scales. Examples include: plagues, biological species, major world religions. The paper applies standard mereotopological theories of spatial regions to agglomerations in this sense. It offers the …Read more
  •  264
    Austria and the rise of scientific philosophy
    In Arkadiusz Chrudzimski & Wolfgang Huemer (eds.), Phenomenology and analysis: essays on Central European philosophy, Ontos. pp. 33-56. 2004.
    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
  •  378
    The cognitive geometry of war
    In Constraints on Correspondence, Hölder/pichler/tempsky. pp. 394--403. 1989.
    When national borders in the modern sense first began to be established in early modern Europe, non-contiguous and perforated nations were a commonplace. According to the conception of the shapes of nations that is currently preferred, however, nations must conform to the topological model of circularity; their borders must guarantee contiguity and simple connectedness, and such borders must as far as possible conform to existing topographical features on the ground. The striving to conform to t…Read more
  •  821
    Realistic Phenomenology
    In Lester Embree (ed.), Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 586-590. 1996.
    The tradition of realist phenomenology was founded in around 1902 by a group of students in Munich interested in the newly published Logical Investigations of Edmund Husserl. Initial members of the group included Johannes Daubert, Alexander Pfänder, Adolf Reinach and Max Scheler. With Reinach’s move to Göttingen the group acquired two new prominent members – Edith Stein and Roman Ingarden. The group’s method turned on Husserl’s idea that we are in possession a priori (which is to say: non-induct…Read more
  •  1212
    Towards an ontology of pain
    with Werner Ceusters, Louis J. Goldberg, and Richard Ohrbach
    In Barry Smith, Werner Ceusters, Louis J. Goldberg & Richard Ohrbach (eds.), Towards an ontology of pain, Keio University Press. 2011.
    We present an ontology of pain and of other pain-related phenomena, building on the definition of pain provided by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP). Our strategy is to identify an evolutionarily basic canonical pain phenomenon, involving unpleasant sensory and emotional experience based causally in localized tissue damage that is concordant with that experience. We then show how different variant cases of this canonical pain phenomenon can be distinguished, including pa…Read more
  •  418
    From concepts to clinical reality: An essay on the benchmarking of biomedical terminologies
    Journal of Biomedical Informatics 39 (3): 288-298. 2006.
    It is only by fixing on agreed meanings of terms in biomedical terminologies that we will be in a position to achieve that accumulation and integration of knowledge that is indispensable to progress at the frontiers of biomedicine. Standardly, the goal of fixing meanings is seen as being realized through the alignment of terms on what are called ‘concepts’. Part I addresses three versions of the concept-based approach – by Cimino, by Wüster, and by Campbell and associates – and surveys som…Read more
  •  468
    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
  •  259
    Ontologies are today being applied in almost every field to support the alignment and retrieval of data of distributed provenance. Here we focus on new ontological work on dance and on related cultural phenomena belonging to what UNESCO calls the “intangible heritage.” Currently data and information about dance, including video data, are stored in an uncontrolled variety of ad hoc ways. This serves not only to prevent retrieval, comparison and analysis of the data, but may also impinge on our ab…Read more
  •  726
    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
  •  525
    Traditional vs. Analytic Philosophy (review)
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 21 (1): 193-202. 1984.
    We review an influential series of lectures on analytic philosophy published in 1976 by the West German philosopher Ernst Tugendhat focusing on Tugendhat's treatment of Husserl, and particularly on issues connected with the notion of dependence or Abhängigkeit central to Husserl's philosophy. These issues are of interest not only because Tugendhat's work is one of the few contributions to contemporary analytic philosophy in which they are confronted explicitly, but also because what he has to sa…Read more
  •  743
    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
  •  874
    Sixteen days
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 28 (1). 2003.
    When does a human being begin to exist? We argue that it is possible, through a combination of biological fact and philosophical analysis, to provide a definitive answer to this question. We lay down a set of conditions for being a human being, and we determine when, in the course of normal fetal development, these conditions are first satisfied. Issues dealt with along the way include: modes of substance-formation, twinning, the nature of the intra-uterine environment, and the nature of the rel…Read more
  •  279
    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
  •  576
    On drawing lines on a map
    In Frank A. U., Kuhn W. & Mark D. M. (eds.), Spatial Information Theory: Proceedings of COSIT '95, Springer. pp. 475-484. 1995.
    The paper is an exercise in descriptive ontology, with specific applications to problems in the geographical sphere. It presents a general typology of spatial boundaries, based in particular on an opposition between bona fide or physical boundaries on the one hand, and fiat or human-demarcation-induced boundaries on the other. Cross-cutting this opposition are further oppositions in the realm of boundaries, for example between: crisp and indeterminate, complete and incomplete, enduring and trans…Read more
  •  767
    Diagrams, Documents, and the Meshing of Plans
    In András 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
  •  59
    Surveys the evidence for an influence of Austrian philosophers – specifically Brentano, Meinong, Husserl, Twardowski and Mach – on the early Wittgenstein. Such influence might either have been direct, for instance through Wittgenstein’s reading of Mach, or indirect, through the mediation of Russell and Moore. The paper concludes by addressing the possible influence of Stumpf and Reinach on Wittgenstein’s technical usage of the term ‘Sachverhalt’ in the Tractatus.
  •  188
    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
  •  802
    Dispositions and Processes in the Emotion Ontology
    with Janna Hastings, Werner Ceusters, and Kevin Mulligan
    In Landgrebe Jobst & Smith Barry (eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Biomedical Ontology, Ceur, Vol. 833. pp. 71-78. 2011.
    Affective science conducts interdisciplinary research into the emotions and other affective phenomena. Currently, such research is hampered by the lack of common definitions of te rms used to describe, categorise and report both individual emotional experiences and the results of scientific investigations of such experiences. High quality ontologies provide formal definitions for types of entities in reality and for the relationships between such entities, definitions which can be used to disamb…Read more
  •  571
    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. 2007.
    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 ’.
  •  225
    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
  •  23
    John Searle (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2003.
    From his groundbreaking book Speech Acts to his most recent studies of consciousness, freedom and rationality John Searle has been a dominant and highly influential figure amongst contemporary philosophers. This systematic introduction to the full range of Searle's work begins with the theory of speech acts and proceeds with expositions of Searle's writings on intentionality, consciousness and perception, as well as a careful presentation of the so-called Chinese Room argument. The volume consid…Read more