Barry Smith
 Barry Smith is a prominent
contributor to both theoretical and applied research in ontology. He is SUNY
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy in the University at
Buffalo, with joint appointments in the
Departments of Biomedical Informatics, Neurology, and Computer Science and Engineering. He is also Director of the National Center
for Ontological Research and Visiting Professor in the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Lugano.
Smith is
the author of some 300 peer-reviewed publications on ontology and related topics, with over 40,000 citations.
His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the US, Swiss and Austrian
National Science Foundations, the Volkswagen Foundation, the European Union, and
the US Department of Defense. In 2002 he received the $2.7 million Wolfgang Paul Award of the Alexander von
Humboldt Foundation. He was awarded the first Paolo Bozzi Prize in Ontology in 2011, and in 2013 he was elected Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (FACMI). Since 2000 he has served as consultant to Hernando de Soto,
Director of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Peru, on
projects relating to the advancement of property and business rights among
the poor in developing countries.
Smith's
pioneering work on the science of ontology led to the establishment of Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). BFO is the most
commonly adopted top-level ontology development framework and was approved in ISO/IEC:21838-2 as an ISO standard top-level ontology. His work led also to
the formation of the OBO (Open Biomedical Ontologies) Foundry, a
suite of interoperable ontology modules designed to support information-driven research in biology and biomedicine.
The methodology underlying BFO and the OBO Foundry is today being applied in a range of different
domains, including military intelligence and
industrial engineering.
Recent Publications
Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith, Why Machines Will Never Rule the World. Artificial Intelligence Without Fear, Abingdon: Routledge, August 2022.
Robert
Arp, Barry Smith and Andrew Spear, Building
Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Chinese translation published in 2020.
Shane Babcock, John Beverley, Lindsay G. Cowell, Barry Smith, "The Infectious Disease Ontology in the age of COVID-19 , Journal of Biomedical Semantics 13, (2021).
Yongqun He, et al., " CIDO, a community-based ontology for coronavirus disease knowledge and data integration, sharing, and analysis, Scientific Data 7 (2020).
Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith, "Making AI Meaningful Again", Synthese (2019).
Sanchita Bhattacharya, et al., "ImmPort: Toward repurposing of open access immunological assay data for translational and clinical research", Scientific Data 5 (2018), 180015.
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