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, documente
here The current revision was released in 2020,
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.
Applications
BFO has been adopted as a foundational ontology by over 450 ontology projects, principally in the areas of biomedical ontology, security and defense (intelligence) ontology, and industry ontologies.
Example applications of BFO can be seen in the
Ontology for Biomedical Investigations
The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an open-access, integrated ontology for the description of biological and clinical investigations. OBI provides a model for the design of an investigation, the protocols and instrumentation used, ...
(OBI).
In 2021, the standard ISO/IEC 21838-2:2021 Information technology — Top-level ontologies (TLO) — Part 2: Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) was published by the Joint Technical Committee of the International Standards Organization and the International Electrotechnical Commission. ISO/IEC 21838 is a multi-part standard. Part 1 of the standard
[https://www.iso.org/standard/71954.html.] specifies the requirements that must be met if an ontology is to be classified as a top-level ontology in accordance with the standard.
See also
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Formal ontology
In philosophy, the term formal ontology is used to refer to an ontology defined by axioms in a formal language with the goal to provide an unbiased (domain- and application-independent) view on reality, which can help the modeler of domain- or a ...
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Ontology engineering
In computer science, information science and systems engineering, ontology engineering is a field which studies the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, which encompasses a representation, formal naming and definition of the categori ...
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Upper ontology
In information science, an upper ontology (also known as a top-level ontology, upper model, or foundation ontology) is an ontology (in the sense used in information science) which consists of very general terms (such as "object", "property", "rela ...
References
Further reading
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External links
Basic Formal Ontology (BFO)Basic Formal Ontology 2.0Basic Formal Ontology 2020
(GitHub)
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Knowledge representation
Information science
Ontology
Ontology (information science)
ISO standards