Basic Formal Ontology (BFO)

Context:
- It is also a top-level ontology that provides a framework for organizing and categorizing all entities in the world based on their basic categories and relations.
- …
Example(s):
- Physical Object,
- Process,
- Quality,
- …
Counter-Example(s):
- a SUMO Ontology.
- a DOLCE Ontology.
- Folksonomy.
See: Ontology, Upper Ontology, Domain Ontology, RO Ontology, CTO Clinical Trials Ontology.

References

(Wikipedia, 2023) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Formal_Ontology Retrieved:2023-6-10.
- Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a top-level ontology developed by Barry Smith and his associates for the purposes of promoting interoperability among domain ontologies built in its terms through a process of downward population. A guide to building BFO-conformant domain ontologies was published by MIT Press in 2015.
  The ontology arose against the background of research in ontologies in the domain of geospatial information science by David Mark, Pierre Grenon, Achille Varzi and others, with a special role for the study of vagueness and of the ways sharp boundaries in the geospatial and other domains are created by fiat.
  BFO has passed through 4 major releases, documented here. The current revision was released in 2020,^[1] and this forms the basis of the standard,which was released by the Joint Committee of the International Standards Organization and International Electrotechnical Commission in 2021.
  The structure of BFO is based on a division of entities into two disjoint categories of continuant and occurrent, the former consists of objects and spatial regions, the latter contains processes conceived as extended through (or spanning) time. BFO thereby seeks to consolidate both time and space within a single framework.

(Arp & Smith, 2008) ⇒ Robert Arp, and Barry Smith. (2008). “Function, Role, and Disposition in Basic Formal Ontology.” In: Proceedings of Bio-Ontologies Workshop (ISMB 2008).
- ABSTRACT: Numerous research groups are now utilizing Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as an upper-level framework to assist in the organization and integration of biomedical information. This paper provides elucidation of the three BFO categories of function, role, and disposition, and considers two proposed sub-categories of artifactual function and bio-logical function. The motivation is to help advance the coherent treatment of functions, roles, and dispositions, to help provide the potential for more detailed classification, and to shed light on BFO’s general structure and use.

(Grenon et al., 2004) ⇒ P. Grenon, Barry Smith, and L. Goldberg. (2004). “Biodynamic ontology: applying BFO in the biomedical domain.” In: Stud Health Technol. Inform., 102.