Barry Smith

Papers on parthood and anatomy

Barry Smith and Berit Brogaard, “Sixteen Days”, The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 28 (2003), 45–78.

On the question of the relation between fetus and mother and the relevance of this question to the question when the human individual begins to exist.

Barry Smith, Igor Papakin and Katherine Munn, 2003, “Bodily Systems and the Modular Structure of the Human Body”, Proceedings of the 9th Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence 2780), Berlin: Springer, 2003, 86–90.

Medical science conceives the human body as a system comprised of many subsystems at a variety of levels. At the highest level are bodily systems proper, such as the endocrine system, which are central to our understanding of human anatomy, and play a key role in diagnosis and in dynamic modeling as well as in medical pedagogy and computer visualization. In this paper we seek to formulate an explicit definition of what a bodily system is.

Barry Smith, Igor Papakin and Katherine Munn, “Bodily Systems and the Spatial-Functional Structure of the Human Body”, in D. M. Pisanelli (ed.), Ontologies in Medicine: Proceedings of the Workshop on Medical Ontologies, Rome October 2003 (Studies in Health and Technology Informatics, 102 (2004)), Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2004, 39–63.

Continues the arguments of the previous paper

Barry Smith and Cornelius Rosse, “The Role of Foundational Relations in the Alignment of Biomedical Ontologies”, in M. Fieschi, et al. (eds.), Medinfo 2004, Amsterdam: IOS Press, 444–448.

The Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) symbolically represents the structural organization of the human body from the macromolecular to the macroscopic levels, with the goal of providing a robust and consistent scheme for classifying anatomical entities that is designed to serve as a reference ontology in biomedical informatics. Here we articulate the need for formally clarifying the is-a and part-of relations in the FMA and similar ontology and terminology systems.

78. Barry Smith and Anand Kumar, “On the Proper Treatment of Pathologies in Biomedical Ontologies”, Proceedings of Bio-Ontologies Workshop, Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB 2005), Detroit, 22–23.

We extend our work on formal definitions in the previous paper to the treatment of pathologies.

Stephan Schulz, Philipp Daumke, Barry Smith and Udo Hahn, “How to Distinguish Parthood from Location in Bioontologies”, Proceedings of the AMIA Symposium 2005, Washington DC, 669–673. PMC1560856

A closer analysis of the spatial relations in biological organisms reveals that the decision as to whether a given particular is part-of a second particular or whether it is only contained-in the second particular is often controversial. We here propose a rule-based approach which allows us to decide on the basis of well-defined criteria which of the two relations holds between two anatomical objects, given that one spatially includes the other.

Barry Smith, “On Classifying Material Entities in Basic Formal Ontology”, in Interdisciplinary Ontology. Proceedings of the Third Interdisciplinary Ontology Meeting, Tokyo: Keio University Press, 2012, 1-13.

On objects and their parts, and the conditions for integrity.