BFO-Intro-Fall-2026

PHI 598LEC Introduction to Basic Formal Ontology

Fall 2026

Faculty: Dr. Barry Smith

ONLINE, TWO CREDIT COURSE, with optional 3rd credit

This course will present an introduction to Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), which is a widely used top-level ontology, approved in 2021 as international standard ISO/IEC 21838-2. The course is divided into an asynchronous and a synchronous part, as follows:

The asynchronous part

This will consists of a series of videos in week-by-week order as listed below.

The lectures will form part of the basis for synchronous working sessions, in which students will be divided into teams. Each month students will give presentations on the results of the work of their team thus far. The final two sessions will be devoted to question-answer sessions (see under 'Grading' below).

You will find further treatment of many of the issues addressed in the videos in the BFO textbook, which is listed under Background Reading below.

The synchronous part

This will consist of practical work by students, either working alone or (preferably) as members of teams. The results of this work will then be communicated through a series of collective zoom meetings (marked in yellow in what follows), supplemented by associated discussions on our Slack channel.

Students will participate in working sessions designed to lead to the creation of online content -- essays, videos, articles, ... -- for example summarizing (or criticizing) aspects of BFO or describing how BFO can be used in specific areas, or reviewing what results when LLMs are used in BFO coding, or how BFO helps you solve a problem at work. Ideally the content should be suitable for distribution to a wider audience. These working sessions will involve teams, which will be put together in the early weeks of the class with the aid of my research assistant Elena Milivinti. It is hoped that one team will address the charges made against BFO in the paper BFO Expert Coding Challenge (perhaps considering also the citations to this paper). Other ideas are: a series of tiktok videos or LinkedIn contributions presenting key aspects of BFO; articles intended for publication; projects demonstrating the utility of BFO e.g. for solving problems you face at work, proposals to improve BFO, and so on. Here creativity will contribute to your grade for this class.

For those students who have a suitable project which they wish to realize on their own, regular meetings with Dr Smith and/or with Ms Milivinti will be organized.

Working sessions are tentatively scheduled to take place from 7-8pm as listed below.

Week 1 (August 24): Inaugural session (synchronous online)

Self-introductions of students

Creation of course chatbot

Week 2 (August 31): Basic Formal Ontology 101

This is an introduction to building ontologies with BFO, with special reference to the rules for deciding whether a given general term designates a universal.

Week 3 (September 7): BFO Tutorial (2019): A Series of 6 Videos

This is a survey of main features of BFO itself in the form of a series of short tutorials. It deals with BFO 2.0, which differs slightly from BFO 2020, which is the most current version. However the differences relate not to BFO itself, but rather to the new First Order Logic axiomatization of BFO, which was introduced with the ISO standard. Details (for those who are interested in such matters) can be found here: https://ncorwiki.buffalo.edu/index.php/BFO_Release_History.

7pm, Wednesday, September 9: First collective team meeting

Choosing topics and methods and dividing into teams. Teams will then meet on their own schedules and report results at the second collective team meeting on October 21.

Week 4 (September 14): Basic Formal Ontology Tutorial

This is a presentation to an audience of engineers at a meeting of the Industrial Ontologies Foundry. It contains examples of what happens when people argue about BFO. BFO is a realist ontology, which means that all terms of BFO are intended to refer to something that exist. How, then, do we provide a BFO-conformant treatment of the work of an industrial designer, at the point where the object he is designing does not yet exist?

Week 5 (September 21): The Ontology of Science

Focuses on the ontology of biology, and on the issue of multi-level ontology -- from molecules to cells to organisms, and from functions at the molecular level to downstream biological processes. BFO claims to be a multi-perspectival ontology, and in particular a multi-granularity ontology, which can work on each of these levels.

Week 6 (September 28): Information Artifacts, Aboutness, and Language

BFO does not contain terms relating to information entities such as words or mathematical equations or poems. Instead it draws on the category of generically dependent continuants (GDCs), which then forms the starting point of the Information Artifact Ontology. Information artifacts are GDCs which are about something.

Week 7 (October 5): Ontology of Terrorism

Acts of terrorism are often described in terms of "sending a message" (for example to a government) through violence or threats of violence. We present the beginnings of an ontology of terrorism on this basis, drawing on the theory of speech acts but also on a more general theory of language according to which a language is a set of capabilities associated with a set of behaviors.

Week 8 (October 12): Capabilities (2022); BFO and DOLCE

The first of these two videos proposes a definition of capability as a universal falling between function and disposition as the latter are defined in Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). Capabilities are like functions in that they can be evaluated on the basis of how well they are realized. They differ from functions in that they are not the rationale for the existence of their bearers. Thus, a water pump may have, in addition to its function of pumping water, many capabilities including: to be weatherproof, to run without lubricant, and so forth. We argue, that all functions are capabilities, but not all capabilities are functions, and we develop a series of axioms to distinguish capabilities formally from both dispositions and functions. We provide examples of the use of capability in a variety of domains, focusing on a definition of language as a capability of persons.

The second video presents a view of how BFO functions as a support for its users.

Week 9 (October 19): Relatively isolated systems

Ingarden's work on ontology is one of the principal sources motivating the creation of BFO. We here present Ingarden's work on systems of different types.

7pm, Wednesday, October 21: Second collective team meeting

Each team will report on preliminary results of their work

Week 10 (October 26): ISO/IEC 21838

This is the top-level ontology / BFO standard

Week 11 (November 2): JOWO Part 1, Part 2, Temporalized Relations

Begins with a 2-part video of a tutorial presented at the JOWO (Joint Ontologies Workshops). Part 1 introduces BFO to a technical audience. Part 2 provides a brief exposition of the rationale for including temporalized relations in the OWL specification of BFO 2020 (ISO/IEC 21838:2). Since OWL can accommodate only two-place relations, and since the de facto standard formalization of BFO uses OWL, there is a need for strategies to capture the temporal dimensions of general assertions such as "Milk teeth are lost as children grow" or "Thermally heated machines are inspected every 6 months." The third video provides an attempt at a simplified exposition of the issues involved.

Week 12 (November 9): The Emotion Ontology, The Ontology of the Organigram

Why do human beings take pleasure in horror movies, or in music that makes them feel sad? What is the ontological status of an office during the period when the office is not occupied? (Consider for instance the case of the Pope.)

Midnight November 10: Deadline for submission of question-answer emails

Week 13 (November 11): 7-8pm First Synchronous question-answer session

Week 14 (November 18): 7-8pm Second Synchronous question-answer session

7pm, November 25, Final collective team meeting

Teams will report on the final results of their work.

Grading

Students will be graded on the basis of:

1. questions (and answers) assembled by students over the course of the semester.

For each session, the student should prepare exactly one single-sentence question relating to one of the videos scheduled for that session, together with a 1-paragraph answer to this question. The answer should not be contained in the video content for this class. All questions and answers should be sent in a single email to ifomis@gmail.com on November 10.

2. interactions and results of the synchronous teams phase

Dr Smith and Ms Milivinti will keep track of your interactions in support of your creative work during the course of the semester. Dr Smith will evaluate this content and also results of your work. Features to be graded will include: creativity, quantity of your contributions, success of your project(s).

Each of 1. and 2. determines 50% of the total grade. Where team work is graded members of teams will receive equal grades.

Additional expectations for students enrolled for 3 credits

Students enrolled for 3 credits may contribute extra work under the asynchronous or synchronous heading, for example serving as leader in a team. Please communicate with Dr Smith (ifomis@gmail.com) to discuss proposals.

Course bibliography

[1] R. Arp, B. Smith, A. Spear, Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology, Cambridge MA: MIT Press (2015).

[2] Jansen, Ludger, and Barry Smith. "Categories in Top-Level Ontologies: Revisiting the Aristotelian Background," Advances in Knowledge Representation, 5(3) (2025).

[3] Peter M. Simons, "Against Set Theory", in: Experience and Analysis, Vienna: HPT&ÖBV, 143-152 (2005).

[4] Barry Smith, "Beyond concepts: ontology as reality representation," in: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2004), 73-84. Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2004.

[5] J. Neil Otte, John Beverley & Alan Ruttenberg, "BFO: Basic Formal Ontology", Applied ontology 17 (1):17-43 (2022)

ISO standard

Awesome BFO

Student Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

Engage in research projects relating to the BFO ontology and how it is deployed.
Support diverse groups working with BFO, including those new to ontology, and those with prior ontology development experience in specific fields, such as medicine, finance, industry and government.
Articulate a range of rationales for adopting BFO, tailored to different audiences.
Extend BFO to new domains by applying design patterns drawn from existing BFO-conformant extension ontologies, such as the Common Core ecosystem of mid-level ontologies.
Demonstrate teamwork and team-management skills through the collaborative development of artifacts — such as videos, podcasts, interviews, and research papers — useful to potential BFO users.
Respond to criticisms of BFO, including by identifying misunderstandings that underlie common critiques.

Supplementary Videos

#	Video Title	Duration	YouTube Link
1	The Ontology of (Supply Chain) Services	11:35	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1Zlunh3eMw
2	Industrial Ontologies Foundry (2022)	7:52	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pfsimHTApU remember to use Closed Captions
3	Ontology of (Social) Services	10:38	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qrwWAISrC8
4	Ontology Foundries	20:51	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFiwmq7f4wQ
5	BFO Tutorial (2019). Part 1: Introduction to BFO ISO	41:11	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muafRW0bXgw
6	IOF: Draft BFO Formalization Proposal. 1-25-2019	31:06	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJgE-O2iREM
7	How BFO Deals with Data from Multiple Contexts	16:31	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9AsCDBRJpM
8	Why Do We Need Upper-Level Ontologies?	20:47	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjf9zeCh_Sw
9	Are there Capabilities on Mars?	1:30:51	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo7iPP2wKgw
10	Building Ontologies: An Introduction for Engineers (Part 1)	54:17	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh0f2Us0hr0
11	Building Ontologies: An Introduction for Engineers (Part 2)	53:01	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vdUUhF4JdE

Grading Policy

Grading follows standard Graduate School policies. Grades will be weighted according to the following breakdown:

Weighting Assignment

20% - class discussions

15% - video presentation

15% - powerpoint slides

50% - essay

Grade Quality Percentage

A	4.0	90.0% -100.00%
A-	3.67	87.0% - 89.9%
B+	3.33	84.0% - 86.9%
B	3.00	80.0% - 83.9%
B-	2.67	77.0% - 79.9%
C+	2.33	74.0% - 76.9%
C	2.00	71.0% - 73.9%
C-	1.67	68.0% - 70.9%
D+	1.33	65.0% - 67.9%
D	1.00	62.0% - 64.9%
F	0	61.9% or below

An interim grade of Incomplete (I) may be assigned if the student has not completed all requirements for the course. An interim grade of 'I' shall not be assigned to a student who did not attend the course. The default grade accompanying an interim grade of 'I' shall be 'U' and will be displayed on the UB record as 'IU.' The default Unsatisfactory (U) grade shall become the permanent course grade of record if the 'IU' is not changed through formal notice by the instructor upon the student's completion of the course.

Assignment of an interim 'IU' is at the discretion of the instructor. A grade of 'IU' can be assigned only if successful completion of unfulfilled course requirements can result in a final grade better than the default 'U' grade. The student should have a passing average in the requirements already completed. The instructor shall provide the student specification, in writing, of the requirements to be fulfilled.

The university’s Graduate Incomplete Policy can be found here.

Related Policies and Services

Academic integrity is a fundamental university value. Through the honest completion of academic work, students sustain the integrity of the university while facilitating the university's imperative for the transmission of knowledge and culture based upon the generation of new and innovative ideas. See http://grad.buffalo.edu/Academics/Policies-Procedures/Academic-Integrity.html.

Accessibility resources: If you have any disability which requires reasonable accommodations to enable you to participate in this course, please contact the Office of Accessibility Resources in 60 Capen Hall, 645-2608 and also the instructor of this course during the first week of class. The office will provide you with information and review appropriate arrangements for reasonable accommodations, which can be found on the web here.

University suppert services: Students are often unaware of university support services. For example, the Center for Excellence in Writing provides support for written work, and several tutoring centers on campus provide academic success support and resources.

Available resources on sexual assault: UB is committed to providing an environment free of all forms of discrimination and sexual harassment, including sexual assault, domestic and dating violence and stalking. If you have experienced gender-based violence (intimate partner violence, attempted or completed sexual assault, harassment, coercion, stalking, etc.), UB has resources to help. This includes academic accommodations, health and counseling services, housing accommodations, helping with legal protective orders, and assistance with reporting the incident to police or other UB officials if you so choose. Please contact UB’s Title IX Coordinator at 716-645-2266 for more information. For confidential assistance, you may also contact a Crisis Services Campus Advocate at 716-796-4399.

Counselling services: As a student you may experience a range of issues that can cause barriers to learning or reduce your ability to participate in daily activities. These might include strained relationships, anxiety, high levels of stress, alcohol/drug problems, feeling down, health concerns, or unwanted sexual experiences. Counseling, Health Services, and Health Promotion are here to help with these or other concerns. You learn can more about these programs and services by contacting:

Counseling Services: 120 Richmond Quad (North Campus), phone 716-645-2720

Health Services: Michael Hall (South Campus), phone: 716-829-3316

Health Promotion: 114 Student Union (North Campus), phone: 716- 645-2837