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
  • On the structures of perceptual Gestalten
    In Philosophy of Mind. Philosophy of Psychology, Vienna: Hölder-pichler-tempsky. pp. 301--304. 1985.
  •  57
    Coordinating virus research: The Virus Infectious Disease Ontology
    with John Beverley, Shane Babcock, Gustavo Carvalho, Lindsay G. Cowell, Sebastian Duesing, Yongqun He, Regina Hurley, Eric Merrell, and Richard H. Scheuermann
    PLoS ONE 1. 2024.
    The COVID-19 pandemic prompted immense work on the investigation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Rapid, accurate, and consistent interpretation of generated data is thereby of fundamental concern. 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 COVID-19 research domain, by following principles of the Open Biological and Biomed…Read more
  •  67
    Beyond the Goods-Services Continuum
    with Peter Koch
    Proceedings of the International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies (Icbo). 2023.
    Governments standardly deploy a distinction between goods and services in assessing economic health and tracking national income statistics, of which medical goods and services carry significant importance. In what follows we draw on Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) to introduce a third kind of entity called patterns, which help capture the various ways in which goods and services are intertwined and help also to show how many services generate a new kind of non-goods-related products. Patterns are a…Read more
  •  125
    Ontology of finance: an introduction
    Rivista di Estetica 84 (3): 3-6. 2023.
    One famous scene in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) is the dialogue between the young Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the expert trader Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey). Hanna is complaining that the stock market is unpredictable; it’s “fugazi … it’s fairy dust. It doesn’t exist. It’s never landed. It is not matter. It’s not on the element chart. It’s not real”. But the fact that something is unpredictable and non-physical does not imply that it does not exist. On the other hand, its unpre…Read more
  •  33
    Podstawowe pojęcia ontologii formalnej
    Lectiones and Acroases Philosophicae 8 (2): 141-161. 2015.
    Idee ontologii formalnej zawdzieczamy filozofowi Edmundowi Husserlowi, który w Badaniach logicznych dokonał rozróznienia na logike formalna i formalna ontologie. Przedmiotem pierwszej sa wzajemne zwiazki pomiedzy prawdami (lub znaczeniami zdan w ogólnosci) relacje wynikania, niesprzecznosc, dowód i obowiazywalnosc. Przedmiotem drugiej sa natomiast wzajemne zwiazki pomiedzy rzeczami przedmiotami i własnosciami, czesciami i całosciami, relacjami i kolektywami. Tak jak logika formalna zajmuje sie …Read more
  •  53
    In Defense of Extreme (Fallibilistic) Apriorism
    Journal of Libertarian Studies 12. 1996.
    How, as Caldwell puts it, does one choose between rival systems all of which claim to rest on a priori foundations? On the nonfallibilistic conception it is difficult to make sense even of the possibility of rival systems of this sort. On the conception here defended, in contrast, the existence of such rival systems can be seen to be a perfectly natural and acceptable consequence of the just-mentioned difficulties we will often fact in coming to know even the intelligible traits of reality: one …Read more
  • Ontology of finance (edited book)
    Rosenberg & Sellier. forthcoming.
    One famous scene in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) is the dialogue between the young Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the expert trader Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey). Hanna is complaining that the stock market is unpredictable; it’s “fugazi … it’s fairy dust. It doesn’t exist. It’s never landed. It is not matter. It’s not on the element chart. It’s not real”. But the fact that something is unpredictable and non-physical does not imply that it does not exist. On the other hand, its unpre…Read more
  •  242
    ChatGPT: Not Intelligent
    Ai: From Robotics to Philosophy the Intelligent Robots of the Future – or Human Evolutionary Development Based on Ai Foundations. 2023.
    In our book, Why Machines Will Never Rule the World, Jobst Landgrebe and I argue that we can engineer machines that can emulate the behaviours only of simple systems, which means: only of those systems whose behaviour we can predict mathematically. The human brain is an example of a complex system, and thus its behaviour cannot be emulated by a machine. We use this argument to debunk the claims of those who believe that large language models are poised to achieve a level of intelligence that wil…Read more
  • Proceedings of InterOntology (Tokyo, Japan, 26-27 February 2008), (edited book)
    Keio University Press. 2008.
  • Joint Forces Command. Report
    with Mark Philips, Lowell Vizenor, and Scott Streit
    . 2010.
  • MIE 2005
    with W. Ceusters and G. De Moor
    . 2005.
  • Ifomis Reports
    with Lowell Vizenor and Werner Ceusters
    Ifomis. 2004.
  •  527
    Ontology of language, with applications to demographic data
    with S. Clint Dowland, Matthew A. Diller, Jobst Landgrebe, and William R. Hogan
    Applied ontology 18 (3): 239-262. 2023.
    Here we present what we believe is a novel account of what languages are, along with an axiomatically rich representation of languages and language-related data that is based on this account. We propose an account of languages as aggregates of dispositions distributed across aggregates of persons, and in doing so we address linguistic competences and the processes that realize them. This paves the way for representing additional types of language-related entities. Like demographic data of other …Read more
  •  384
    In a development that has still been hardly noticed by philosophers, a conception of ontology has been advanced in recent years in a series of extra-philosophical disciplines as researchers in linguistics, psychology, geography and anthropology have sought to elicit the ontological commitments (‘ontologies’, in the plural) of different cultures or disciplines. Exploiting the terminology of Quine, researchers in psychology and anthropology have sought to establish what individual human subjects, …Read more
  •  186
    Some defenders of so-called `artificial intelligence' believe that machines can understand language. In particular, Søgaard has argued in his "Understanding models understanding language" (2022) for a thesis of this sort. His idea is that (1) where there is semantics there is also understanding and (2) machines are not only capable of what he calls `inferential semantics', but even that they can (with the help of inputs from sensors) `learn' referential semantics. We show that he goes wrong beca…Read more
  •  442
    The view of nature we adopt in the natural attitude is determined by common sense, without which we could not survive. Classical physics is modelled on this common-sense view of nature, and uses mathematics to formalise our natural understanding of the causes and effects we observe in time and space when we select subsystems of nature for modelling. But in modern physics, we do not go beyond the realm of common sense by augmenting our knowledge of what is going on in nature. Rather, we have meas…Read more
  •  121
    Thinking Like an Austrian
    In Jo Ann Cavallo & Walter Block (eds.), Libertarian Autobiographies: Moving Toward Freedom in Today’s World, Springer. pp. 421-425. 2023.
    Autobiography of Barry Smith; emphasizes the role of Dummett and Husserl, Austrian philosophy and economics, and the Munich-Göttingen-Kraków school of realist phenomenology.
  •  142
    Improving the Quality and Utility of Electronic Health Record Data through Ontologies
    with Asiyah Yu Lin, Sivaram Arabandi, Thomas Beale, William Duncan, Hicks D., Hogan Amanda, R. William, Mark Jensen, Ross Koppel, Catalina Martínez-Costa, Øystein Nytrø, Jihad S. Obeid, Jose Parente de Oliveira, Alan Ruttenberg, Selja Seppälä, Dagobert Soergel, Jie Zheng, and Stefan Schulz
    Standards 3 (3). 2023.
    The translational research community, in general, and the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) community, in particular, share the vision of repurposing EHRs for research that will improve the quality of clinical practice. Many members of these communities are also aware that electronic health records (EHRs) suffer limitations of data becoming poorly structured, biased, and unusable out of original context. This creates obstacles to the continuity of care, utility, quality improvemen…Read more
  • Applied Ontology: A Marvin Farber Conference on Law and Institutions in Society (edited book)
    with David R. Koepsell
    University at Buffalo. 1998.
    The application of ontology has thus far [in 1998] been confined almost exclusively to the field of knowledge representation. Ontology has been applied, for example, in the design of medical databases and in the construction of geographical information systems. One area which is naturally suited to ontological analysis is that of the law and of social institutions in general. Legal systems are composed of legal entities, such as laws, contracts, obligations, and rights. Their application yields …Read more
  •  59
    Matematyka a Ontologiczna Estetyka Ingardena
    Studia Filozoficzne 1 (122): 51-56. 1976.
    This paper applies the ontological framework developed by Roman Ingarden in his Controversy over the Existence of the World to the domain of mathematics, concluding with some remarks on parallels between the mode of existence of mathematical entities on the one hand and of values on the other.
  •  213
    The future of ontologies
    In Terminology, Ontology and their Implementations, Springer Nature. 2023.
    We have now reached the point at which cloud computing and other types of advanced infrastructure are bringing about a situation in which knowledge objects can be delivered in an efficient manner to hose who need to consume them. And just as highways were the infrastructure necessary for a manufacturing economy, serving as the arteries along which raw materials and manufactured goods coming in from all directions could flow, so we believe that ontologies will in the future provide an important p…Read more
  •  7
    Chapter 10: Ontological Relations
    with Ulf Schwarz
    In Katherine Munn & Barry Smith (eds.), Applied Ontology: An Introduction, Ontos. pp. 219-234. 2008.
  •  3
    Chapter 6: A Theory of Granular Partitions
    with Thomas Bittner
    In Katherine Munn & Barry Smith (eds.), Applied Ontology: An Introduction, Ontos. pp. 125-158. 2008.
  •  1
    Chapter 5: The Benefits of Realism: A Realist Logic with Applications
    In Katherine Munn & Barry Smith (eds.), Applied Ontology: An Introduction, Ontos. pp. 109-124. 2008.
  •  1
    Chapter 4: New Desiderata for Biomedical Terminologies
    In Katherine Munn & Barry Smith (eds.), Applied Ontology: An Introduction, Ontos. pp. 83-108. 2008.
  • Chapter 1: Philosophy and Biomedical Information Systems
    with Bert Klagges
    In Katherine Munn & Barry Smith (eds.), Applied Ontology: An Introduction, Ontos. pp. 21-38. 2008.
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  •  3
    Human Action in the Healthcare Domain: A Critical Analysis of HL7’s Reference Information Model
    with Lowell Vizenor and Werner Ceusters
    In Christer Svennerlind, Almäng Jan & Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson (eds.), Johanssonian Investigations: Essays in Honour of Ingvar Johansson on His Seventieth Birthday, Ontos Verlag. pp. 554-573. 2013.
  •  6
    Truth-Makers
    In Jean-Maurice Monnoyer (ed.), Metaphysics and Truthmakers, Ontos Verlag. pp. 9-50. 2007.