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BFO, the Basic Formal Ontology, is an upper level ontology that grew out of a philosophical orientation which overlaps with that of DOLCE and SUMO. Unlike these, however, it is narrowly focused on the task of providing a genuine upper ontology which can be used in support of domain ontologies developed for scientific research, as for example in biomedicine within the framework of the OBO Foundry. Thus BFO does not contain physical, chemical, biological or other terms which would properly fall within the special sciences domains.
The BFO project was initiated in 2002 under the auspices of the project Forms of Life sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation. The theory behind BFO was developed first by Barry Smith and Pierre Grenon and presented in a series of publications listed here.
Since then important contributions to BFO have been made by many people, including:
...and by more than hundred other members of the BFO Discussion Group.
News
- BFO 2.0 (Under Development): Textual specification (Draft), FOL version and OWL-DL (Draft)
- Event: Introduction to Basic Formal Ontology 2.0
Implementations
(Current Version: 1.1.1)
- OWL-DL - created by Holger Stenzhorn with large contributions from Andrew Spear and others (HTML view)
- Isabelle (FOL) - created by Thomas Bittner
- OBO - created by Chris Mungall
Material
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Technical Reports
- Pierre Grenon: "Spatio-temporality in Basic Formal Ontology: SNAP and SPAN, Upper-Level Ontology, and Framework for Formalization"
- Pierre Grenon: "BFO in a Nutshell: A Bi-categorial Axiomatization of BFO and Comparison with DOLCE"
- Pierre Grenon: "Nuts in BFO's Nutshell: Revisions to the Bi-categorial Axiomatization of BFO"
Publications
- Barry Smith: "Against Fantology"
- Barry Smith: "Beyond Concepts: Ontology as Reality Representation"
- Pierre Grenon and Barry Smith: "SNAP and SPAN: Towards Geospatial Dynamics"
- Pierre Grenon, Barry Smith and Louis Goldberg: "Biodynamic Ontology: Applying BFO in the Biomedical Domain"
- Barry Smith and Pierre Grenon: "The Cornucopia of Formal Ontological Relations"
- Barry Smith: "Basic Tools of Formal Ontology"
- Robert Arp and Barry Smith: "Function, Role, and Disposition in Basic Formal Ontology"
