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Week 2 (January 28): Basic Formal Ontology 101 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sbzF9p7qvk Video] | Week 2 (January 28): Basic Formal Ontology 101 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sbzF9p7qvk Video] | ||
Week 3 (February 4): | |||
An introduction to building ontologies with BFO, with special reference to the rules for deciding whether a given general term designates a universal. | An introduction to building ontologies with BFO, with special reference to the rules for deciding whether a given general term designates a universal. | ||
Revision as of 16:21, 24 January 2026
PHI 598LEC Introduction to Basic Formal Ontology - Spring 2026
Faculty: Dr. Barry Smith
ONLINE, HYBRID, TWO 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 course is divided into an asynchronous and a synchronous part, as follows:
The asynchronous part will consists of a series of videos listed in week-by-week order below. (The complete list will be made available soon.) Students are invited to communicate directly with BS if they have comments or questions relating to the successive videos, ideally raising these questions in the week immediately following the date associated with the video in question. Where you have comments or questions which you believe will be of general interest to other students in the class, these should be submitted to the Slack channel. You will find further treatment of the issues addressed in the videos in the BFO textbook listed under Background Reading below.
Questions and all other contributions relating to the video content, whether communicated through zoom meetings, emails or via Slack, will form part of the material used for grading this class.
The synchronous part, 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 zoom meetings, 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. Ideally the content should be suitable for distribution to a wider audience. These working session swill involve teams, which will be put together in the early weeks of the class with the aid of Elena Miliventi, who is my research assistant (and also a student in this glass). 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).
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 Miliventi will be organized.
Working sessions are tentatively scheduled to take place from 7-8pm as listed in the table below. Options are: videos (youtube, tiktok, articles intended for publication, ...)
Week 1 (January 21): Inaugural session
Week 2 (January 28): Basic Formal Ontology 101 Video
Week 3 (February 4):
An introduction to building ontologies with BFO, with special reference to the rules for deciding whether a given general term designates a universal.
Note that March 18 is Spring recess.
| # | Date | Topics | Related links | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | January 21 | this course STEM/Phil, summer school?, textbook, readings, history of BFO, ISO, BFO coding using LLMs | www.youtube.com/@basicformalontology470 | |
| 2 | January 28 | top-level vs domain ontologies; top of BFO | ||
| 3 | February 4 | specific dependence, realizables | ||
| 4 | February 11 | material entities; object aggregates, sites, boundaries | ||
| 5 | February 18 | realizables , functions | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkkWkTIxrNQ | |
| 6 | February 25 | social wholes, dispositions and roles | ||
| 7 | March 4 | relations, temporalized relations | ||
| 8 | March 11 | processes, process profiles, changes, | last part of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sbzF9p7qvk | |
| 9 | March 25 | IAO, language #42 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3btP1InPZY | |
| 10 | April 1 | BFO 101 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sbzF9p7qvk | |
| 11 | April 8 | DOLCE PSS | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTVR7k63_VA | |
| 12 | April 15 | Foundries | ||
| 13 | April 22 | GDCs, Ingarden, the State | ||
| 14 | April 29 | Synchronous question answer session | ||
| 15 | May 5 | Synchronous question/answer session |
Material for the course will be based on the following BFO tutorials, supplemented by documentation of more recent developments:
Revised versions of this tutorial material will be divided into 14 single-hour lectures which will be made available asynchronously. The lectures will form the basis for synchronous weekly working sessions tentatively scheduled for Wednesdays at 7-8pm.
Grading
Students will be graded on the basis of
- Working sessions (50%)
- Final (50%) synchronous session, based on questions assembled by students over the course of the semester, as follows:
- For each asynchronous session each student should prepare exactly one single-sentence question relating to the content of this session. The answer to this question should not be contained in the video content for this session. All questions should be sent in a single email to ifomis@gmail.com on April 30.
Background reading:
Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology (MIT Press, 2015)
Here's your Wikimedia table:
| # | Video Title | Duration | YouTube Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Basic Formal Ontology 101 (July 2025) | 1:58:50 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sbzF9p7qvk |
| 2 | Basic Formal Ontology Tutorial (2025) | 1:46:05 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWkk5AfRCpM |
| 3 | The Ontology of Science | 1:06:08 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwsBxRs9kns |
| 5 | Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), July 2023 | 10:20 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uflMfvI-ZxI |
| 6 | The Ontology of (Supply Chain) Services | 11:35 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1Zlunh3eMw |
| 7 | Industrial Ontologies Foundry (2022) | 7:52 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pfsimHTApU |
| 8 | Ontology of (Social) Services | 10:38 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qrwWAISrC8 |
| 9 | Ontology Foundries | 20:51 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFiwmq7f4wQ |
| 10 | ISO/IEC 21838 Top Level Ontologies (November 2021) | 10:57 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsdcH-yYkTI |
| 11 | Realizable Entities in Basic Formal Ontology | 1:36:36 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJaEYdF9ikE |
| 12 | How to handle data about what does not exist | 7:43 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ai4YdLiCGNM |
| 13 | ISO/IEC 21838 | 10:00 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aux_zcK7XSI |
| 14 | Reasoning with the Information Artifact Ontology | 7:47 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTx_rRWmTqE |
| 15 | BFO 2020 Temporalized Relations | 34:10 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkkWkTIxrNQ |
| 16 | ISO/IEC 21838 | 1:32:41 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0masZPGLb0 |
| 17 | What problem with OWL is BFO-2020 trying to solve | 28:04 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDs7Pthdows |
| 18 | Ontologies for Space and Ground Systems | 29:05 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3ugXHOyLLw |
| 20 | BFO JOWO Tutorial Part 2 | 1:10:53 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh_KZGXc1Es |
| 21 | BFO JOWO Tutorial Part 1 | 23:27 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYDe09TOw2M |
| 22 | Introduction to Basic Formal Ontology (September 2019) | 8:51 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0buEjR3t8A |
| 23 | Ontology as Product-Service System: A Study of GO, BFO and DOLCE | 11:29 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTVR7k63_VA |
| 24 | BFO Tutorial (2019). Part 5: BFO as Top-Level Ontology | 21:16 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMUM1z2Zi9c |
| 25 | BFO Tutorial (2019). Part 6: Temporalized Relations in BFO ISO | 21:55 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-dGGDQ7qCw |
| 26 | BFO Tutorial (2019). Part 4: Sites, Boundaries, Objects | 19:45 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJJcu0UKQyo |
| 27 | BFO Tutorial (2019). Part 3: Qualities, Dispositions, Diseases | 24:37 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UmKWQ-fH4s |
| 28 | BFO Tutorial (2019). Part 2: Why Ontologies Fail | 39:43 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5d5KmBqw3w |
| 29 | BFO Tutorial (2019). Part 1: Introduction to BFO ISO | 41:11 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muafRW0bXgw |
| 30 | Basic Formal Ontology Applied to the Ontology of Language. With a coda on the Turing Test | 39:42 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3btP1InPZY |
| 31 | IOF: Draft BFO Formalization Proposal. 1-25-2019 | 31:06 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJgE-O2iREM |
| 36 | How BFO Deals with Data from Multiple Contexts | 16:31 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9AsCDBRJpM |
| 37 | Why Do We Need Upper-Level Ontologies? | 20:47 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjf9zeCh_Sw |
| 38 | Relationships between upper-level ontologies | 1:02:25 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJxfZ3cq5jE |
| 39 | Functions, Dispositions and Capabilities (2017) | 31:15 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIPg2bGJSzE |
| 40 | Are there Capabilities on Mars? | 1:30:51 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo7iPP2wKgw |
| 41 | Introduction to BFO and to the Industrial Ontologies Foundry | 47:16 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ4uW7PK5cI |
| 42 | Building Ontologies: An Introduction for Engineers (Part 2) | 53:01 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vdUUhF4JdE |
| 43 | Building Ontologies: An Introduction for Engineers (Part 1) | 51:30 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDARyJBvnuc |
| 44 | Building Ontologies: An Introduction for Engineers (Part 2) | 1:44:30 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh0f2Us0hr0 |
| 45 | Building Ontologies: An Introduction for Engineers (Part 1) | 54:17 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTNQYyh88-Y |
| 46 | Introduction to Basic Formal Ontology (2015): Part One | 7:48 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMCBON2me3Y |
| 47 | Introduction to Basic Formal Ontology (2015): Part Two | 1:44:29 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGPVCkuKTo4 |
| 48 | Tutorial: Introduction to Basic Formal Ontology 2.0 (2015) | 54:16 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl6_M1sQEAQ |
| 49 | Introduction to Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) 2012 | 7:14 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjOgoKvNNMM (BAD QUALITY) |
| 50 | Part1: Changes in BFO 2.0, by BarrySmith | N/A | N/A |
| 51 | Aboutness | 21:44 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBKsupBquok |