February 11, 2025

Finishing Touches For Your

Where Security Matters

ISO/IEC recognizes Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as a top level ontology for supporting global information technology – Department of Philosophy

Investigation News

 graphic illustrating ontology.

By BERT GAMBINI

Barry Smith; SUNY Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Julian Park Chair; Ph.D.; Manchester; Director; National Center for Ontological Research; Affiliate Professor of Biomedical Informatics; Computer Science; and Neurology; Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences; University at Buffalo 2016.

UB is a top middle in the area of utilized ontology, which develops the means important to construct logically coherent information classification methods. A single crucial resource for this perform has now been acknowledged as an global normal by the Intercontinental Corporation for Standardization (ISO) and Intercontinental Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) as conformant to the joint ISO/IEC Best-Degree Ontology standard.

That useful resource is the Primary Formal Ontology (BFO), which is utilized in endeavours ranging from genomics investigation, to electronic producing, to the U.S. Department of Defense.

BFO is the initial piece of philosophy at any time to receive this sort of recognition.

BFO was developed and is preserved by a workforce led by Barry Smith, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Office of Philosophy, College of Arts and Sciences, and director of UB’s National Heart for Ontological Investigate (NCOR). Smith led the UB team driving the exertion, which bundled Werner Ceusters, division main, Biomedical Ontology, Jacobs College of Drugs and Biomedical Sciences, and Alan H. Ruttenberg, former director of medical and translational info trade, UB Faculty of Dental Medicine.

The time period “ontology” at first referred to a branch of metaphysics. In the latest context, an “ontology” is a computational inventory of sorts of objects, processes and the relationships among them. Ontologies present controlled vocabularies whose frequent use by database and information and facts programs builders will allow their knowledge to be much more correctly mixed, retrieved and analyzed.

Hundreds of ontologies have been developed in several specific domains, but BFO is a “top-level” ontology that is relevant to any domain whatsoever. It offers a widespread architecture for use in supporting any formal vocabulary.

“The publication of the new ISO/IEC standard has far-achieving implications that will encourage new degrees of innovation and collaboration not beforehand doable,” Smith points out. “In numerous disciplines for the final 20 decades or so, people have engaged in initiatives to standardize categories in different places. Individuals standardized sets are ontologies. Increasingly, BFO provides the architecture used to do that do the job.”

The historical past of ontology

The accomplishment of the Human Genome Project gave rise pretty quickly to huge quantities of new sorts of information — facts about genes, proteins and other molecular sequences. Biologists and health care researchers had to locate some way to hook up these new knowledge to the work they had been executing on biological procedures in humans and other organisms, including procedures main to disorder. The Gene Ontology (GO), established in 1998, provided a consensus vocabulary that could be applied to tag sequences identified in all sorts of experiments involving organic phenomena.

In 2004, the GO leadership invited Smith to support handle the logical challenges that arose when the GO by itself required to be linked to other ontologies covering domains these kinds of as chemistry or anatomy. The preliminary edition of BFO, which presented a domain-neutral commencing point for ontology constructing, was the result of this get the job done.

Its successes in biology led the U.S. Army to think about BFO for some of its intelligence requires in 2010. Considering the fact that then, multiple companies in the U.S. Division of Protection and the U.S. intelligence group have followed match. Currently, there are approximately 500 institutions and teams that have ontology initiatives making use of BFO.

When Smith commenced doing work with the U.S. Army, he also became concerned with CUBRC, a Buffalo-primarily based scientific analysis, growth, testing and units integration corporation that arose through a strategic relationship concerning UB and a community technology enterprise in 1983 as a bridge between academia and sector. Currently, CUBRC employs much more than 170 engineers and experts who complete superior analysis, improvement, engineering and tests companies in the parts of aeroscience chemical, biological and health-related sciences and information sciences.

“CUBRC’s main prospects arrive from all components of the U.S. Division of Protection,” suggests Smith. “Based on the ever-expanding need to align and semantically increase pretty big and numerous data to assistance a large assortment of defense and intelligence programs, CUBRC begun a smaller ontology staff comprised of previous UB learners and associates, which constructed what came to be the Widespread Core Ontologies (CCO), a really vast-ranging suite of open up source ontologies centered on BFO that is now used in essential initiatives relating to defense and intelligence.”

Early on, CUBRC identified the potential effects across a vast assortment of applications of subjecting BFO to the ISO system.

“As a outcome, CUBRC supplied equally technical and money assistance to Dr. Smith as he navigated the very long and complicated system that resulted in the publication of the new intercontinental common,” suggests Michael Moskal, CUBRC CIO and senior vice-president.

How it functions

BFO is rather smaller but universal in the sense that, in accordance to Smith, its types can be used by much more or significantly less all people with facts. Everybody requires time and house objects and processes qualities and sites. These are just the sorts of general conditions outlined computationally by BFO.

“Let’s say you have a person, or a tank, or a molecule. In every single situation, you have an item. Object is a standard group, even though tank is reduced down the scale,” claims Smith. “Similarly, if you have a clot forming or a bullet firing, then you have a approach, which is a different prime-degree classification. BFO supplies a implies for domain ontologists to make classes at decreased ranges in a consistent way. That consistency is substantial simply because of the ever-recurring require to pool resources, as with interagency collaborations, or corporate mergers, or scientific collaborations. When databases are designed in isolation, it gets very costly when they want to be blended.”

To see the sorts of complications that come up, contemplate the word “post,” which has a number of definitions and shades of which means. Speakers of American English may possibly imagine of a wooden object when they listen to “post,” but speakers of British English might be referring to the method of delivering mail. Human beings are capable to operate out the nuances separating a piec
e of timber from the postal provider, but desktops need to plow forward with just the information and facts that has been coded. Common use of BFO can at the very least relieve some of the problems that then come up.

As yet another illustration, get the expression “hole.” German and French engineers doing the job in 2006 on separate pieces of the fuselage for the Airbus 380 had conflicting ways of symbolizing holes in their respective laptop or computer-aided design and style offers. But their databases plowed ahead with their design and style guidance. The discrepancy involving the two definitions was not realized till the two parts getting developed separately in Hamburg and Toulouse ended up brought alongside one another. It was only then that crews threading the hundreds of miles of wiring by the plane’s airframe declared that they ran out of slack in advance of achieving the required relationship points.

Rate tag to fix a handful of millimeters of mismeasurement? About $6 billion.

BFO development of philosophers

A philosophical track record is ideally suited for making anything like BFO, notes Smith, mainly because of the discipline’s broad character.

Specialists make their understanding inside of a distinct specialty or domain.

“Engineers know a ton about engineering, and pc scientists know a good deal about personal computer science, but philosophers know a little little bit — specifically the pretty general little bit — about almost everything, and that is what is expected to construct a leading-degree architecture that all people can share, no matter if you are talking about gene sequencing or army mission preparing,” states Smith.

Large data storage and integration demands are contemporary realities of all scientific undertakings.

“The ISO/IEC standard establishes BFO as the 1st Leading Stage Ontology for describing advanced processes, objects and features in strategies that will allow for researchers to commence with greater self-assurance that their data will be reusable by other folks,” suggests Smith.