Barry Smith (ontologist)

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Barry Smith (born 4 June 1952) is Julian Park Distinguished Professor of Philosophy in the University at Buffalo (New York, USA) and Research Scientist in the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences. From 2002 to 2006 he was Director of the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science in Leipzig and Saarbrücken, Germany.

He is the author of some 450 scientific publications, including 15 authored or edited books, and editor of The Monist: An International Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry. His research has been funded by the US, Swiss and Austrian National Science Foundations, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the European Union. In 2002 he received in recognition of his scientific achievements the 2.2 million euro Wolfgang Paul Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

He is a coordinator of the OBO Foundry and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Gene Ontology Consortium, the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations Working Group, and of the Cleveland Clinic Semantic Database.

Smith's current research focus is ontology and its applications in biomedicine and biomedical informatics, where he is working on a variety of projects relating to biomedical terminologies and electronic health records. He is also collaborating with Hernando de Soto, Director of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Lima, Peru, on the ontology of property rights and social development.