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
  •  583
    Coordinating Coronavirus Research: The COVID-19 Infectious Disease Ontology
    with John Beverley, Shane Babcock, Yongqun He, Eric Merrell, Lindsay Cowell, Regina Hurley, and Sebastian Duesing
    Proceedings of the International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies. 2022.
    The COVID-19 pandemic prompted immense work on the investigation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Ontologies – structured, controlled, vocabularies – are designed to support consistency of interpretation, and thereby to prevent the development of data silos. This paper describes how ontologies are serving this purpose in the virus research domain, following the principles of the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry and drawing on the resources of the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) Co…Read more
  •  441
    A Semantics-Based Common Operational Command System for Multiagency Disaster Response
    with Linda Elmhadhbi, Mohamed-Hedi Karray, Bernard Archimède, and J. Neil Otte
    IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management 69 (6). 2022.
    Disaster response is a highly collaborative and critical process that requires the involvement of multiple emergency responders (ERs), ideally working together under a unified command, to enable a rapid and effective operational response. Following the 9/11 and 11/13 terrorist attacks and the devastation of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, it is apparent that inadequate communication and a lack of interoperability among the ERs engaged on-site can adversely affect disaster response efforts. Within t…Read more
  •  286
    In “Ontologies Relevant to behaviour change interventions: A Method for their Development” Wright, et al. outline a step by step process for building ontologies of behaviour modification – what the authors call the Refined Ontology Developmental Method (RODM) – and demonstrate its use in the development of the Behaviour Change Intervention Ontology (BCIO). RODM is based on the principles of good ontology building used by the Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry in addition to those outlined in…Read more
  •  707
    Enriching the Functionally Graded Materials (FGM) Ontology for digital manufacturing
    with Munira Mohd Ali, Ruoyu Yang, Binbin Zhang, Francesco Furini, Rahul Rai, and J. Neil Otte
    International Journal of Production Research 59 (18): 5540-5557. 2021.
    Functionally graded materials (FGMs) have been used in many different kinds of applications in recent years and have attracted significant research attention. However, we do not yet have a commonly accepted way of representing the various aspects of FGMs. Lack of standardised vocabulary creates obstacles to the extraction of useful information relating to pertinent aspects of different applications. A standard resource is needed for describing various elements of FGMs, including existing applic…Read more
  •  2486
    CIDO, a community-based ontology for coronavirus disease knowledge and data integration, sharing, and analysis
    with Oliver He, John Beverley, Gilbert S. Omenn, Brian Athey, Luonan Chen, Xiaolin Yang, Junguk Hur, Hsin-hui Huang, Anthony Huffman, Yingtong Liu, Yang Wang, Edison Ong, and Hong Yu
    Scientific Data 181 (7): 5. 2020.
    Ontologies, as the term is used in informatics, are structured vocabularies comprised of human- and computer-interpretable terms and relations that represent entities and relationships. Within informatics fields, ontologies play an important role in knowledge and data standardization, representation, integra- tion, sharing and analysis. They have also become a foundation of artificial intelligence (AI) research. In what follows, we outline the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO), w…Read more
  •  313
    On Credentials
    with Olimpia Giuliana Loddo and Giuseppe Lorini
    Journal of Social Ontology 6 (1): 47-67. 2020.
    Credentials play an important role in all modern societies, but the analysis of their nature and function has thus far been neglected by social philosophers. We present a view according to which the function of credentials is certify the identity and the institutional status (including the rights) of individuals. More importantly, credentials enable rights-holders to exercise their rights, so that for a particular right to be exercisable the right-holder should possess, carry and sometimes show …Read more
  •  4392
    Ontology and Cognitive Outcomes
    with David Limbaugh, Jobst Landgrebe, David Kasmier, Ronald Rudnicki, and James Llinas
    Journal of Knowledge Structures and Systems 1 (1). 2020.
    The term ‘intelligence’ as used in this paper refers to items of knowledge collected for the sake of assessing and maintaining national security. The intelligence community (IC) of the United States (US) is a community of organizations that collaborate in collecting and processing intelligence for the US. The IC relies on human-machine-based analytic strategies that 1) access and integrate vast amounts of information from disparate sources, 2) continuously process this information, so that, 3) a…Read more
  •  3172
    The Infectious Disease Ontology in the Age of COVID-19
    with Shane Babcock, Lindsay G. Cowell, and John Beverley
    Journal of Biomedical Semantics 12 (13). 2021.
    The Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) is a suite of interoperable ontology modules that aims to provide coverage of all aspects of the infectious disease domain, including biomedical research, clinical care, and public health. IDO Core is designed to be a disease and pathogen neutral ontology, covering just those types of entities and relations that are relevant to infectious diseases generally. IDO Core is then extended by a collection of ontology modules focusing on specific diseases and patho…Read more
  •  221
    The development of ontologies for the purposes of data curation is an important element in modern-day data and information sciences. Unfortunately, much of the work on these applied ontologies is associated with a relativist or conceptualist point of view, according to which ontologies represent (for example) the concepts in the minds of human beings. The paper describes a series of problems with such views, and defends an alternative realist interpretation.
  •  238
    Review of Harald Delius, Self-Awareness: A Semantical Inquiry (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 46 170-173. 1985.
    The thesis of Delius's book is that statements of self-awareness such as "I am aware that I see a cat" possess what he calls 'Cartesian characteristics' of indubitability or absolute self-evidence. He argues that this is the case in virtue of the fact that such statements are not about anything independent of themselves. The book is described as a 'semantical inquiry', but it is not by any means a contribution to the philosophy of language of the predictable sort. Statements of self-awareness ex…Read more
  •  314
    Ontologies for Space and Ground Systems
    In Ground System Architectures Workshop, Gsaw. pp. 1-3. 2020.
    We will survey a range of ontologies relevant to space and ground system domains. The ontologies form part of the Common Core Ontology ecosystem (CCO) developed under the IARPA KDD initiative. We focus specifically on the Space Domain Ontologies, a suite of ontologies to support space situational awareness, including the Spacecraft Mission Ontology, Spacecraft Ontology, Space Event Ontology and Space Object Ontology.
  •  163
    Harald Delius, Self-Awareness: A Semantical Inquiry (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 46 (1): 170-173. 1985.
  •  194
    Social Objects
    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
  •  306
    OHMI: The Ontology of Host-Microbiome Interactions
    with Yongqun He, Haihe Wang, Jie Zheng, Daniel P. Beiting, Anna Maria Masci, Hong Yu, Kaiyong Liu, Jianmin Wu, Jeffrey L. Curtis, Alexander V. Alekseyenko, and Jihad S. Obeid
    Journal of Biomedical Semantics 10 (1): 1-14. 2019.
    Host-microbiome interactions (HMIs) are critical for the modulation of biological processes and are associated with several diseases, and extensive HMI studies have generated large amounts of data. We propose that the logical representation of the knowledge derived from these data and the standardized representation of experimental variables and processes can foster integration of data and reproducibility of experiments and thereby further HMI knowledge discovery. A community-based Ontology of H…Read more
  •  209
    Interdyscyplinarne perspektywy rozwoju, integracji i zastosowań ontologii poznawczych
    with Janna Hastings, Gwen Frishkoff, Mark Jensen, Russell Poldrack, Jane Lomax, Anita Bandrowski, Fahim Imam, Jessica Turner, Maryann Martone, and Przemysław Nowakowski
    Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 7 (3): 101-117. 2016.
    We discuss recent progress in the development of cognitive ontologies and summarize three challenges in the coordinated development and application of these resources. Challenge 1 is to adopt a standardized definition for cognitive processes. We describe three possibilities and recommend one that is consistent with the standard view in cognitive and biomedical sciences. Challenge 2 is harmonization. Gaps and conflicts in representation must be resolved so that these resources can be combined for…Read more
  •  134
    Phenomenological Tendencies in British Moral Theory
    with Dallas Willard
    In Lester Embree (ed.), Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 81-85. 1995.
    There is an inherent phenomenological tendency in British moral theory, especially from John Locke onward. The purpose of his Essay was, he said, to consider the discerning faculties of a man, as they are employed about the objects which they have to do with. This is language that might serve well in a general description of the work of Husserl and other phenomenologists
  •  316
    Warum hat sich die deutsche Philosophie so sehr und so langanhaltend an Autoritäten und Texte gebunden gefühlt, fast als ob man – wie die alten Iatrophilologen – Wissen aus bloßen Worten herauspressen wollte? Warum haben sich in Deutschland so häufig philosophische Sprachstile entwickelt, die ein Hindernis fur das Verständnis der entsprechenden Texte sind?
  •  141
    Witasek
    In Monika Betzler & Julian Nida-Rümelin (eds.), Ästhetik und Kunstphilosophie von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart in Einzeldarstellungen, Alfred Kröner Verlag. pp. 821-824. 1998.
    Stephan Witasek was a student and follow of Meinong, who applied Meinong's ideas on the ontology of the non-existent to the working out of a theory of aesthetic phenomena in his Grundzüge der allgemeinen Ästhetik of 1904. Witasek shows how our feelings undergo certain sorts of structural modifications when they are directed towards what does not exist. He draws a distinction between genuine mental phenomena and what he calls ‘phantasy-material’, asserting that ‘the job of the aesthetic object, w…Read more
  •  210
    Independently of whether an object of experience becomes a candidate for being a part of the self or a part of the external world, it is always given to us as just an object of experience. The observer-observed relation can be seen as a type of relation with many instances, both between the self and different objects of experience and between any given object of experience and different selves. The self is situated in a spatial grid, where the latter can be characterised as an array of relations…Read more
  •  697
    This paper defends a view of the Gene Ontology (GO) and of Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as examples of what the manufacturing industry calls product-service systems. This means that they are products (the ontologies) bundled with a range of ontology services such as updates, training, help desk, and permanent identifiers. The paper argues that GO and BFO are contrasted in this respect with DOLCE, which approximates more closely to a scientific theory or a scientific publication. The paper provide…Read more
  •  810
    Mental Capabilities
    with Eric Merrell, David Limbaugh, and Alex Anderson
    In Eric Merrell, David Limbaugh, Alex Anderson & Barry Smith (eds.), Proceedings of the International Conference on Biomedical Ontology (ICBO), University at Buffalo, NY, . 2019.
    We propose capability as a universal or type intermediate between function and disposition. A capability is, broadly speaking, a disposition that is of a type whose instances can be evaluated on the basis of how well they are realized. A function, on the view we are proposing, is a capability the possession of which is the rationale for the existence of its bearer. To say for example that a water pump has the function to pump water is to say that the pump exists because something was needed that…Read more
  •  695
    What follows is a first step towards an ontology of conscious mental processes. We provide a theoretical foundation and characterization of conscious mental processes based on a realist theory of intentionality and using BFO as our top-level ontology. We distinguish three components of intentional mental process: character, directedness, and objective referent, and describe several features of the process character and directedness significant to defining and classifying mental processes. We arr…Read more
  •  674
    A First-Order Logic Formalization of the Industrial Ontology Foundry Signature Using Basic Formal Ontology
    with Farhad Ameri, Hyunmin Cheong, Dimitris Kiritsis, Dusan Sormaz, Chris Will, and J. Neil Otte
    In Barry Smith, Farhad Ameri, Hyunmin Cheong, Dimitris Kiritsis, Dusan Sormaz, Chris Will & J. Neil Otte (eds.), ”, Proceedings of the Joint Ontology Workshops (JOWO), Graz, . 2019.
    Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a top-level ontology used in hundreds of active projects in scientific and other domains. BFO has been selected to serve as top-level ontology in the Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF), an initiative to create a suite of ontologies to support digital manufacturing on the part of representatives from a number of branches of the advanced manufacturing industries. We here present a first draft set of axioms and definitions of an IOF upper ontology descending from BFO…Read more
  •  912
    In this paper we propose an Ontology of Commercial Exchange (OCE) based on Basic Formal Ontology. OCE is designed for re-use in the Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) and in other ontologies addressing different aspects of human social behavior involving purchasing, selling, marketing, and so forth. We first evaluate some of the design patterns used in the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) and Product Types Ontology (PTO). We then propose terms and definitions that we believe will imp…Read more
  •  287
    Naive Fizyka: Esej w ontologii
    with Roberto Casati
    Science Blog. 2012.
    W dziełach Arystotelesa, lub z medievals, jak również w pismach późniejszych zdroworozsądkowe filozofów, takich jak Thomas Reid czy GE Moore’a, możemy znaleźć rodzinę różnych prób uporania się ze strukturami rozsądku i wspólnego -sense świat, który jest nam dany w normalnym, doświadczenie pre-teoretycznym. Będziemy argumentować, co wynika, że ​​teoria takich struktur stanowi ważny i dotychczas niedoceniany związek między wczesnym psychologii Gestalt z jednej strony, oraz współczesnych osiągnięć …Read more
  •  639
    A diagnostic process is an investigative process that takes a clinical picture as input and outputs a diagnosis. We propose a method for distinguishing diagnoses that are warranted from those that are not, based on the cognitive processes of which they are the outputs. Processes designed and vetted to reliably produce correct diagnoses will output what we shall call ‘warranted diagnoses’. The latter are diagnoses that should be trusted even if they later turn out to have been wrong. Our work is …Read more
  •  367
    How Many Kafka's Are There?
    with Sonia Kamińska
    Polish Journal of Aesthetics 53 (2): 9-13. 2019.
    The aim of this volume is to present Kafka not as a writer, or not only as a writer, but as a philosopher. However, even after narrowing the scope of our interest down, there will still be several Kafka’s left on the table. Themes treated in the volume include: the so-called Brentano School in Prague, Kafka’s affiliation to the Louvre Circle, Kafka and existentialist philosophy, Kafka’s Jewish heritage, his love of Nietzsche and Meister Eckhart and—last but not least, since he was such an except…Read more
  •  509
    Geographical Categories: An Ontological Retrospective
    with David M. Mark
    International Journal of Geographical Information Science 15 (7). 2001.
    Since it is only five years since the publication of our paper, "Geographical categories: An ontological investigation" (Smith and Mark 2001), it seems somewhat strange to be making retrospective comments on the piece. Nevertheless, the field is moving quickly, and much has happened since the article appeared. A large number of papers have already cited the work, which suggests that there is a seam here that people find worthy of being mined. In this short essay, we first review the paper and at…Read more
  •  1124
    Preliminary version of “Towards a History of Speech Act Theory”, in A. Burkhardt (ed.), Speech Acts, Meanings and Intentions. Critical Approaches to the Philosophy of John R. Searle, Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1990, 29–61.
  •  300
    Die ganze Welt ist eine Bühne: Zur Ökologie und Ontologie menschlicher und tierischer Lebenswelt
    Interdisziplinäre Phänomenologie / Interdisciplinary Phenomenology (Kyoto) 1 31-44. 2004.
    Die klassische bikategoriale Ontologie von Substanzen und Akzidentien ist für die Festlegung der Strukturen menschlichen und tierischen Verhaltens nicht hinreichend, da die Umwelten dieses Verhaltens sich nicht in dieses klassische System einfügen. Wir bieten dementsprechend den Grundriß einer Theorie der besonderen Gebilde, die die Alltagswelten menschlicher und tierischer Verhalten konstituieren. Die Ausgangsüberlegung ist die folgende, Wir sind alle (Schau)spieler, und diese brauchen eine Büh…Read more