Basic Formal Ontology (BFO)

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BFO grows out of a philosophical orientation which overlaps with that of DOLCE and SUMO. Unlike these, however, it is narrowly focused on the task of providing a genuine upper ontology which can be used in support of domain ontologies developed for scientific research, as for example in biomedicine within the framework of the OBO Foundry. Thus BFO does not contain physical, chemical, biological or other terms which would properly fall within the special sciences domains.

The theory behind BFO has been developed and formulated by Barry Smith and Pierre Grenon in a series of publications. Its development has been carried out under the auspices of the project Forms of Life sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation.

Implementations

• OWL - description logic based, created by Holger Stenzhorn with large contributions from Andrew Spear and others
  • Version 1.0 (namespace: http://www.ifomis.org/bfo/1.0#)
  • Version 1.1 (namespace: http://www.ifomis.org/bfo/1.1#)
  • For more recent versions see here

Publications

• Barry Smith: "Against Fantology"
• Barry Smith: "Beyond Concepts: Ontology as Reality Representation"
• Pierre Grenon and Barry Smith: "SNAP and SPAN: Towards Geospatial Dynamics"
• Pierre Grenon, Barry Smith and Louis Goldberg: "Biodynamic Ontology: Applying BFO in the Biomedical Domain"
• Barry Smith and Pierre Grenon: "The Cornucopia of Formal Ontological Relations"
• Barry Smith: "Basic Tools of Formal Ontology"
• Robert Arp and Barry Smith: "Function, Role, and Disposition in Basic Formal Ontology"