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642Individuals, universals, collections: On the foundational relations of ontologyIn Achille C. Varzi & Laure Vieu (eds.), ”, Formal Ontology in Information Systems. Proceedings of the Third International Conference, Ios Press. 2004.This paper provides an axiomatic formalization of a theory of foundational relations between three categories of entities: individuals, universals, and collections. We deal with a variety of relations between entities in these categories, including the is-a relation among universals and the part-of relation among individuals as well as cross-category relations such as instance-of, member-of, and partition-of. We show that an adequate understanding of the formal properties of such relations – in …Read more
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48Wanting what we don’t want to want: Representing Addiction in Interoperable Bio-OntologiesIn Janna Hastings, Nicolas Le Novère, Werner Ceusters, Kevin Mulligan & Barry Smith (eds.), Wanting what we don't want to want: Representing Addiction in Interoperable Bio-Ontologies, Ceur. 2012.Ontologies are being developed throughout the biomedical sciences to address standardization, integration, classification and reasoning needs against the background of an increasingly data-driven research paradigm. In particular, ontologies facilitate the translation of basic research into benefits for the patient by making research results more discoverable and by facilitating knowledge transfer across disciplinary boundaries. Addressing and adequately treating mental illness is one of our most p…Read more
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1608Ontology (science)In Barry Smith & Christopher Welty (eds.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS), Acm Press. pp. 21-35. 2001.Increasingly, in data-intensive areas of the life sciences, experimental results are being described in algorithmically useful ways with the help of ontologies. Such ontologies are authored and maintained by scientists to support the retrieval, integration and analysis of their data. The proposition to be defended here is that ontologies of this type – the Gene Ontology (GO) being the most conspicuous example – are a part of science. Initial evidence for the truth of this proposition (which some…Read more
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35Individuals, universals, collections: On the foundational relations of ontologyIn Barry Smith & Christopher Welty (eds.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS), Acm Press. 2001.This paper provides an axiomatic formalization of a theory of foundational relations between three categories of entities: individuals, universals, and collections. We deal with a variety of relations between entities in these categories, including the is-a relation among universals and the part-of relation among individuals as well as cross-category relations such as instance-of, member-of, and partition-of. We show that an adequate understanding of the formal properties of such relations – in …Read more
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A strategy for improving and integrating biomedical ontologiesIn Ron Rudnicki (ed.), Proceedings of the Annual Symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association, Amia. 2007.The integration of biomedical terminologies is indispensable to the process of information integration. When terminologies are linked merely through the alignment of their leaf terms, however, differences in context and ontological structure are ignored. Making use of the SNAP and SPAN ontologies, we show how three reference domain ontologies can be integrated at a higher level, through what we shall call the OBR framework (for: Ontology of Biomedical Reality). OBR is designed to facilitate infe…Read more
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39Ontology: Towards a New SynthesisIn Nicola Guarino (ed.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems, Ios Press. 1998.This introduction to the second international conference on Formal Ontology and Information Systems presents a brief history of ontology as a discipline spanning the boundaries of philosophy and information science. We sketch some of the reasons for the growth of ontology in the information science field, and offer a preliminary stocktaking of how the term ‘ontology’ is currently used. We conclude by suggesting some grounds for optimism as concerns the future collaboration between philosophical…Read more
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23Referent Tracking for Command and Control Messaging SystemsIn Shahid Manzoor, Werner Ceusters & Barry Smith (eds.), Referent Tracking for Command and Control Messaging Systems, Ceur, Vol. 555. 2009.The Joint Battle Management Language (JBML) is an XML-based language designed to allow Command and Control (C2) systems to interface easily with Modeling and Simulation (M&S) systems. While some of the XML-tags defined in this language correspond to types of entities that exist in reality, others are mere syntactic artifacts used to structure the messages themselves. Because these two kinds of tags are not formally distinguishable, JBML messages in effect confuse data with what the data represen…Read more
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29A Taxonomy of Granular PartitionsIn Spatial Information Theory. Foundations of Geographic Information Science, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2205. 2001.In this paper we propose a formal theory of partitions (ways of dividing up or sorting or mapping reality) and we show how the theory can be applied in the geospatial domain. We characterize partitions at two levels: as systems of cells (theory A), and in terms of their projective relation to reality (theory B). We lay down conditions of well-formedness for partitions and we define what it means for partitions to project truly onto reality. We continue by classifying well-formed partitions along…Read more
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1373OntologyIn Luciano Floridi (ed.), The Blackwell guide to the philosophy of computing and information, Blackwell. pp. 155-166. 2003.Ontology as a branch of philosophy is the science of what is, of the kinds and structures of objects, properties, events, processes and relations in every area of reality. ‘Ontology’ is often used by philosophers as a synonym of ‘metaphysics’ (a label meaning literally: ‘what comes after the Physics’), a term used by early students of Aristotle to refer to what Aristotle himself called ‘first philosophy’. Sometimes ‘ontology’ is used in a broader sense, to refer to the study of what might exist;…Read more
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A science of topography: From qualitative ontology to digital representationsIn David M. Mark & Barry Smith (eds.), Geographic Information Science and Mountain Geomorphology, Chichester, England: Springer-praxis. pp. 75--100. 2004.
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On Place and Space: The Ontology of the EruvIn Christian Kanzian (ed.), Cultures. Conflict - Analysis - Dialogue: Proceedings of the 29th International Ludwig Wittgenstein-Symposium in Kirchberg, Austria, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 403-416. 2007.
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The Theory of Value of Christian von EhrenfelsIn Reinhard Fabian (ed.), Christian von Ehrenfels: Leben und Werk, Rodopi. pp. 150--171. 1986.Christian von Ehrenfels was a student of both Franz Brentano and Carl Menger and his thinking on value theory was inspired both by Brentano’s descriptive psychology and by the subjective theory of economic value advanced by Menger, the founder of the Austrian school of economics. Value, for Ehrenfels, is a function of desire, and we ascribe value to those things which we either do in fact desire, or would desire if we were not convinced of their existence. He asserts that the needed theoretical …Read more
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Referent Tracking Portions of RealityIn Werner Ceusters, Shahid Manzoor & Barry Smith (eds.), Referent Tracking of Portions of Reality. Docket No. 1097.015A (USPA 2009055437), Us Patent Office. 2008.
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54Ontologies for the life sciencesIn Schulze-Kremer Steffen & Smith Barry (eds.), Encyclopedia of Genetics, Genomics, Proteomics and Bioinformatics, vol. 4, Wiley. 2005.Where humans can manipulate and integrate the information they receive in subtle and ever changing ways from context to context, computers need structured and context-free background information of a sort which ontologies can help to provide. A domain ontology captures the stable, highly general and commonly accepted core knowledge for an application domain. The domain at issue here is that of the life sciences, in particular molecular biology and bioinformatics. Contemporary life science resear…Read more
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1L’ontologia del senso communeIn Evandro Agazzi (ed.), Valore e limiti del senso comune, F. Angeli. 2004.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
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The development of non-coding RNA ontologyInternational Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics 15 (3): 214--232. 2016.
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25OntologyIn Luciano Floridi (ed.), The Blackwell guide to the philosophy of computing and information, Blackwell. pp. 153-166. 2003.Ontology as a branch of philosophy is the science of what is, of the kinds and structures of objects, properties, events, processes and relations in every area of reality. ‘Ontology’ in this sense is often used by philosophers as a synonym of ‘metaphysics’ (a label meaning literally: ‘what comes after the Physics’), a term used by early students of Aristotle to refer to what Aristotle himself called ‘first philosophy’. But in recent years, in a development hardly noticed by philosophers, the ter…Read more
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39Gestalt psychologyIn Thomas Baldwin (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, . pp. 51-52. 1998.The term ‘Gestalt’ was introduced into psychology by the Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels in an essay entitled “On ‘Gestalt-Qualities’” published in 1890. ‘Gestalt,’ in colloquial German, means roughly: ‘shape’ or ‘structure’ or ‘configuration’, and Ehrenfels demonstrates in his essay that there are certain inherently structural features of experience which need to be acknowledged in addition to simple tones, colours and other mental ‘atoms’ or ‘elements’. His essay thus initiated a …Read more
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4OntologyIn Luciano Floridi (ed.), The Blackwell guide to the philosophy of computing and information, Blackwell. pp. 153-166. 2003.Ontology as a branch of philosophy is the science of what is, of the kinds and structures of objects, properties, events, processes and relations in every area of reality. ‘Ontology’ in this sense is a term often used by philosophers as a synonym of ‘metaphysics’ (a label meaning literally: ‘what comes after the Physics’), a term used by early students of Aristotle to refer to what Aristotle himself called ‘first philosophy’. But in recent years, in a development hardly noticed by philosophers, …Read more
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12Ontological Tools for Geographic RepresentationIn Nicola Guarino (ed.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems, Ios Press. pp. 77-85. 1998.This paper is concerned with certain ontological issues in the foundations of geographic representation. It sets out what these basic issues are, describes the tools needed to deal with them, and draws some implications for a general theory of spatial representation. Our approach has ramifications in the domains of mereology, topology, and the theory of location, and the question of the interaction of these three domains within a unified spatial representation theory is addressed. In the final p…Read more
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8 Common senseIn Barry Smith & David Woodruff Smith (eds.), The Cambridge companion to Husserl, Cambridge University Press. pp. 394. 1995.
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Prolegomena to a Metaphysics of Real EstateIn Roberto Casati (ed.), Shadows and Socio-Economic Units. Foundations of Formal Geography, Technical University of Vienna. pp. 151--155. 1996.
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40Ontology and geographic kindsIn T. Poiker & N. Chrisman (eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling, 308–320., International Geographic Union. 1998.An ontology of geographic kinds is designed to yield a better understanding of the structure of the geographic world, and to support the development of geographic information systems that are conceptually sound. This paper first demonstrates that geographical objects and kinds are not just larger versions of the everyday objects and kinds previously studied in cognitive science. Geographic objects are not merely located in space, as are the manipulable objects of table-top space. Rather, they ar…Read more
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23Sechzehn Tage: Wann beginnt ein menschliches Leben?In Guido Imagire & Christine Schneider (eds.), Untersuchungen zur Ontologie, . pp. 3-40. 2006.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
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16Towards a history of speech act theoryIn Barry Smith (ed.), Constraints on Correspondence, Hölder/pichler/tempsky. 1989.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 non-standard aspects of…Read more
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Topological foundations of cognitive scienceIn Topological foundations of cognitive science, Graduiertenkolleg Kognitionswissenschaft. pp. 3--22. 1994.
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50The Curious Case of the Complicated Border: The Story of BaarleDutch International Society Magazine 47 (4): 11-17. 2016.History has left a territory composed of two municipalitics, whose shape is unique, belonging partly to the Netherlands and partly to Belgium. Earlier both parts belonged to the former Duchy of Brabant, a tenitory that is now split up into the Dutch province of Noord-Brabant (including Baarle-Nassau) and thc Belgian provinces of Antwerp (which includes Baarle-Hertog), Vlaams Brabant, Brussels, and Brabant-Wallon. People are quite comfortable with this situation, even though it raises many compli…Read more
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22Truth-MakersIn Jean-Maurice Monnoyer (ed.), Metaphysics and Truthmakers, Ontos Verlag. pp. 18--9. 2007.Reprint of paper first published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in 1984.
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119Intelligence. And what computers still can’t doCosmos+Taxis 12 (5+6): 104-114. 2024.We comment on the collection of papers inspired by our book Why Machines Will Never Rule the World published in volume 12 (5+6) of the journal Cosmos+Taxis. We summarize the arguments made by the contributors about what we say in the book, and then show where we disagree.
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13Malaria Diagnosis and the Plasmodium Life Cycle: The BFO PerspectiveIn Werner Ceusters & Barry Smith (eds.), Interdisciplinary Ontology. Proceedings of the Third Interdisciplinary Ontology Meeting, Keio University Press. 2010.Definitive diagnosis of malaria requires the demonstration through laboratory tests of the presence within the patient of malaria parasites or their components. Since malaria parasites can be present even in the absence of malaria manifestations, and since symptoms of malaria can be manifested even in the absence of malaria parasites, malaria diagnosis raises important issues for the adequate understanding of disease, etiology and diagnosis. One approach to the resolution of these issues adopts …Read more
Barry Smith
University at Buffalo
National Center for Ontological Research
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University at BuffaloDepartment of Philosophy
Biomedical Informatics
Neurology
Computer Science and EngineeringDistinguished Professor, Julian Park Chair -
National Center for Ontological ResearchAdministrator
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APA Eastern Division
Buffalo, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Ontology |
Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence |
Philosophy of Biology |