Barry Smith

Barry Smith is a prominent contributor to both theoretical and applied research in ontology. He is the author of some 500 publications on ontology and related topics, and editor of The Monist: An International Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry. His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the US, Swiss and Austrian National Science Foundations, the US Department of Defense, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the European Union. In 2002 he received the 2 million Euro Wolfgang Paul Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2010 he was awarded the first Paolo Bozzi Prize in Ontology by the University of Turin.

Smith is SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Director of the National Center for Ontological Research and of the Center for Brain and Behavior Informatics in the University at Buffalo. He is also Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Neurology and of Computer Science.

Smith’s pioneering work on the science of ontology led to the formation of the OBO (Open Biomedical Ontologies) Foundry, a set of resources designed to support information-driven research in biology and biomedicine. Smith is one of the principal scientists of the NIH National Center for Biomedical Ontology, a Scientific Advisor to the Gene Ontology Consortium, and a PI on the Protein Ontology and Infectious Disease Ontology projects.

Selected Publications

Citations

Pierre Grenon and Barry Smith, Foundations of an Ontology of Philosophy, Synthese, 2011, 18(2), 185-204.

Werner Ceusters and Barry Smith, Foundations for a Realist Ontology of Mental Disease, Journal of Biomedical Semantics, 2010, 1:10, 1-23.

Barry Smith and Werner Ceusters, Ontological Realism as a Methodology for Coordinated Evolution of Scientific Ontologies, Applied Ontology, 5, 2010, 139–188.

Barry Smith, Austrian Economics and Austrian Philosophy, in W. Grassl and B. Smith (eds.), Austrian Economics: Historical and Philosophical Background, London: Routledge, 2010, 1–36.

Barry Smith, Michael Ashburner, et al., The OBO Foundry: Coordinated Evolution of Ontologies to Support Biomedical Data Integration, Nature Biotechnology, 25 (11), 2007, 1251-1255.

Barry Smith, Werner Ceusters, et al., Relations in Biomedical Ontologies, Genome Biology 2005, 6 (5), R46.

Barry Smith, Beyond Concepts, or: Ontology as Reality Representation, Achille Varzi and Laure Vieu (eds.), Formal Ontology and Information Systems. Proceedings of the Third International Conference (FOIS 2004), Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2004, 73–84.

Barry Smith, Ontology, in Luciano Floridi (ed.), Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, 155–166.

Barry Smith and David M. Mark, Do Mountains Exist? Towards an Ontology of Landforms, Environment and Planning B (Planning and Design), 30 (3), 2003, 411–427.

Barry Smith, Fiat Objects, Topoi, 20: 2 (September 2001), 131–148. 

Barry Smith and Achille Varzi, Fiat and Bona Fide Boundaries, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60 (2), 2000, 401–420.

Barry Smith and Achille Varzi, The Niche, Nous, 33 (2), 1999, 198–222.

Barry Smith, On Drawing Lines on a Map, in Andrew U. Frank and Werner Kuhn (eds.), Spatial Information Theory. A Theoretical Basis for GIS (LNCS 988), Berlin/Heidelberg/New York, etc.: Springer, 1995, 475–484.

Barry Smith, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano, La Salle and Chicago: Open Court, 1994, xiii + 381pp.

Kevin Mulligan, Peter M. Simons and Barry Smith, Truth-Makers, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 44 (1984), 287–321.

For further information see http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith