Barry Smith (ontologist)

Barry Smith (born 4 June 1952) is a 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 (IFOMIS) in Leipzig and Saarbrücken, GermaUny. Since 2007 he acts as Research Director of IFOMIS.

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 National Institutes of Health, 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 Wolfgang Paul Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2010 he received the first Paolo Bozzi Prize for Ontology from the University of Turin.

Smith authored a letter to The Times concerning Jacques Derrida receiving an honorary degree from Cambridge University, in which he set out numerous reasons why he did not support this prospect.

He is leader of the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) project, a Coordinating Editor of the OBO Foundry and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Gene Ontology Consortium, the OBI (Ontology for Biomedical Investigations) Working Group, and of the Cleveland Clinic Semantic Database.

Smith's research focus is ontology and its applications, especially 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.

Contents 1 See also 2 References 3 Bibliography 4 External links

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

References

Bibliography

Books

• Structure and Gestalt: Philosophy and Literature in Austria-Hungary and Her Successor States (ed.), 1981.
• Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology (ed.), Munich/Vienna: Philosophia, 1982.
• Foundations of Gestalt Theory (ed.), Munich/Vienna: Philosophia, 1988.
• Adolf Reinach, Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Ausgabe mit Kommentar, Band I: Die Werke, Teil I: Kritische Neuausgabe (1905–1914), Teil II: Nachgelassene Texte (1906–1917); Band II: Kommentar und Textkritik (ed. with Karl Schuhmann), Munich/Vienna: Philosophia 1989.
• Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology, 2 vols. (ed. with Hans Burkhardt), Munich/Vienna: Philosophia, 1991.
• Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano, Chicago-LaSalle, Open Court, 1994.
• The Cambridge Companion to Husserl (ed., with David W. Smith), Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Rationality and Irrationality (ed., with Berit Brogaard), Vienna: öbv&hpt, 2001.
• Formal Ontology in Information Systems (ed. with Christopher Welty and Barry Smith (eds.), New York: ACM Press, 2001.
• John Searle (ed.), Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• Applied Ontology: An Introduction (ed. with K. Munn), 2008.
• The Mystery of Capital and the Construction of Social Reality (ed. with David Mark and Isaac Ehrlich), Chicago: Open Court, 2008.
• Biomedizinische Ontologie. Philosophie – Lebenswissenschaften - Informationstechnik, (ed., with Ludger Jansen), Zurich: vdf, 2008.

Articles

• Pierre Grenon and Barry Smith, “Foundations of an Ontology of Philosophy”, Synthese (2011), DOI 10.1007/s11229-009-9658-x
• Barry Smith and Werner Ceusters, “Ontological Realism as a Methodology for Coordinated Evolution of Scientific Ontologies”, Applied Ontology, 5, 2010, 139–188.
• Barry Smith, “[1] Austrian Economics and Austrian Philosophy”, in W. Grassl and B. Smith (eds.), Austrian Economics: Historical and Philosophical Background, London: Routledge, 2010, 1–36.
• Barry Smith, Michael Ashburner, Cornelius Rosse, et al., “The OBO Foundry: Coordinated Evolution of Ontologies to Support Biomedical Data Integration”, Nature Biotechnology, 25 (11), November 2007, 1251 -1255.
• Barry Smith, Werner Ceusters, Bert Klagges, et al., “Relations in Biomedical Ontologies”, Genome Biology, 2005, 6 (5), R46.
• Pierre Grenon and Barry Smith, “SNAP and SPAN: Towards Dynamic Spatial Ontology”, Spatial Cognition and Computation, 4 (1), 2004, 69–103.
• Barry Smith and Cornelius Rosse, “The Role of Foundational Relations in the Alignment of Biomedical Ontologies”, in M. Fieschi, et al. (eds.), Medinfo 2004, Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2004, 444–448.
• Barry Smith, "Beyond Concepts, or: Ontology as Reality Representation”, Achille Varzi and Laure Vieu (eds.), Formal Ontology and Information Systems. Proceedings of the Third International Conference (FOIS 2004), Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2004, 73–84.
• Barry Smith, “Ontology”, in Luciano Floridi (ed.), Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, 155–166.
• Barry Smith, Jennifer Williams and Steffen Schulze-Kremer, 2003, “The Ontology of the Gene Ontology”, Proceedings of the Annual Symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association, 2003, 609–613.
• Barry Smith and David M. Mark, “Do Mountains Exist? Towards an Ontology of Landforms”, Environment and Planning B (Planning and Design), 30 (3), 2003 , 411–427.
• Barry Smith, “Fiat Objects”, Topoi, 20: 2 (September 2001), 131–148.
• Barry Smith and David M. Mark, “Geographical Categories: An Ontological Investigation”, International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 15 (7), 2001, 591–612.
• Barry Smith and Achille Varzi, “Fiat and Bona Fide Boundaries”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60 (2), 2000, 401–420.
• Barry Smith and Achille Varzi, “http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/niches.pdf The Niche]”, Nous, 33 (2), 1999, 198–222.
• Barry Smith, “Mereotopology: A Theory of Parts and Boundaries”, Data and Knowledge Engineering, 20, 1996, 287–303.
• Barry Smith, “On Drawing Lines on a Map”, in Andrew U. Frank and Werner Kuhn (eds.), Spatial Information Theory. A Theoretical Basis for GIS (LNCS 988), Berlin/Heidelberg/New York, etc.: Springer, 1995, 475–484.
• Kevin Mulligan, Peter M. Simons and Barry Smith, “Truth-Makers”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 44 (1984), 287–321.

External links

• Introduction to Biomedical Ontology in Eight Lectures (Streaming Video)
• The OBO Foundry: Coordinated Evolution of Ontologies to Support Biomedical Data Integration
• Barry Smith's faculty page at the University of Buffalo
• Works by or about Barry Smith (ontologist) in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science
• The OBO Foundry
• Basic Formal Ontology

Persondata
Name	Smith, Barry
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	4 June 1952
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death