Phismith at 17:13, 20 April 2026

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	ONLINE, ASYNCHRONOUS, THREE CREDIT COURSE		ONLINE, ASYNCHRONOUS, THREE CREDIT COURSE

	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.		This course will introduce students to Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), a top-level ISO standard ontology framework that serves as a shared, reusable foundation for domain ontologies in biomedical, scientific, industrial and government domains. It will cover the BFO framework's core distinctions and explore how BFO functions as the upper-level backbone for major ontologies in the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry, the Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) and the National Security Ontologies Foundry (NSOF). All of these use BFO as a basis for representing real-world domains in a rigorous and interoperable way. It will also address the philosophical underpinnings of BFO's realist approach, its formal axiomatization in OWL and FOL, and practical skills for building and evaluating ontologies aligned with the BFO hierarchy. In this way it will prepare students to contribute to large-scale, cross-domain knowledge integration projects in science, medicine, and beyond.

	The ~~coure~~ will be built around a series of videos in week-by-week order as listed below.		The courae will be built around a series of videos in week-by-week order as listed below.

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

Phismith at 17:06, 20 April 2026

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	==PHI ~~598LEC~~ Introduction to Basic Formal Ontology==		==PHI 598 Introduction to Basic Formal Ontology==
	'''Fall 2026'''		'''Fall 2026'''

Phismith: Created page with "==PHI 598LEC Introduction to Basic Formal Ontology== '''Fall 2026''' Faculty: Dr. Barry Smith ONLINE, ASYNCHRONOUS, THREE CREDIT COURSE 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 coure will be built around a series of videos in week-by-week order as listed below. Students will find further treatment of many of the issues addresse..."

2026-04-20T15:46:58Z

Created page with "==PHI 598LEC Introduction to Basic Formal Ontology== '''Fall 2026''' Faculty: Dr. Barry Smith ONLINE, ASYNCHRONOUS, THREE CREDIT COURSE 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 coure will be built around a series of videos in week-by-week order as listed below. Students will find further treatment of many of the issues addresse..."

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==PHI 598LEC Introduction to Basic Formal Ontology==
'''Fall 2026'''

Faculty: Dr. Barry Smith

ONLINE, ASYNCHRONOUS, THREE CREDIT COURSE

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 coure will be built around a series of videos in week-by-week order as listed below.

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

In addition students will be provided with data and documents relating to the uses and the wider reception of BFO. These materials are to be used to prepare an essay, a pointpoint presentation and a youtube vide, addressing issues relating to BFO's use and reception. Guidance will be provided by Dr Smith in the course of the semester, along with feedback on successive drafts of the paper and presentation.

==Week 1: Inaugural session: Introduction and background==

==Week 2: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sbzF9p7qvk 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: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyngZgIl3WTj6tWcypTLpCnYXu6o93kD4 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.

==Week 4: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWkk5AfRCpM 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: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwsBxRs9kns The Ontology of Science]==

:Focuses on the 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: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTx_rRWmTqE Information Artifacts], [https://youtu.be/PBKsupBquok Aboutness], and [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3btP1InPZY Language]==
==Wednesday, February 25, 7-8pm: Team meeting==

: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: [https://youtu.be/G4lg1_-XpiE 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: [https://youtu.be/jH1sc7FTs3w Capabilities (2022)]; ==
: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.

==Week 9: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTVR7k63_VA BFO and DOLCE]
:How BFO functions as a support for its users.

==Week 10: [https://youtu.be/-OUr0tuFloM 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.

==Week 11: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0masZPGLb0 ISO/IEC 21838]==
:This is the top-level ontology / BFO standard

==Week 12: JOWO [https://youtu.be/VYDe09TOw2M Part 1], [https://studio.youtube.com/video/wh_KZGXc1Es/edit Part 2], [https://youtu.be/fkkWkTIxrNQ 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 13: [https://youtu.be/18php_34s-M The Emotion Ontology]==

==Midnight (November 30): Deadline for submission of your essay and powerpoint presentation==

==Week 14 7-8pm First Synchronous Student Presentation Session==

==Week 15 7-8pm Second Synchronous Student Presentation Session==

==Grading==

Students will be graded on the basis of essay and powerpoint presentation

==Background reading==

:[https://www.iso.org/standard/74572.html ISO standard]
:[https://grokipedia.com/page/basic_formal_ontology Grokipedia on Basic Formal Ontology]
:[https://github.com/PR0CK0/awesome-bfo Awesome BFO]
:[https://buffalo.box.com/s/3pyas5wwfwd2bgbe5o2dz36kncm9z5gf] R. Arp, B. Smith, A. Spear, ''Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology'', Cambridge MA: MIT Press (2015).
:[https://philpapers.org/rec/JANCIT-2] Jansen, Ludger, and Barry Smith. "Categories in Top-Level Ontologies: Revisiting the Aristotelian Background," ''Advances in Knowledge Representation'', 5(3) (2025).
:[https://philpapers.org/rec/SIMAST] Peter M. Simons, "Against Set Theory", in: ''Experience and Analysis'', Vienna: HPT&ÖBV, 143-152 (2005).
:[https://philarchive.org/rec/SMIBCO] 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.

==Supplementary Videos==

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! # !! 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

Introduction to Basic Formal Ontology: Fall 2026 - Revision history

Phismith at 17:13, 20 April 2026

Phismith at 17:06, 20 April 2026