Barry Smith (ontologist)

From 1970 to 1973 Smith studied Mathematics and Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He obtained his PhD from the University of Manchester in 1976 for a dissertation on ontology and reference in Husserl and Frege.[3] The dissertation was supervised by Wolfe Mays.

Among the cohort of graduate students supervised by Mays in Manchester were Kevin Mulligan (Geneva/Lugano), and Peter Simons (Trinity College, Dublin), both of whom shared with Smith an interest in analytic metaphysics and in the contributions of certain turn-of-the-century Continental philosophers and logicians to central issues of analytic philosophy.[4] In 1979 Mulligan, Simons and Smith together founded the Seminar for Austro-German Philosophy,[5] which organized workshops and conferences centered around the work of early Central European philosophers from Bolzano to Tarski and their impact on subsequent generations. One prominent supporter of these meetings was Roderick Chisholm, who in his Intellectual Autobiography published in 1997[6] describes their 'significant role' in contemporary philosophy.

From 1976 to 1994 Smith held appointments at the University of Sheffield (1976–1979), the University of Manchester (1979–1989) and the International Academy of Philosophy, Liechtenstein (1989–1994). In 1994 he moved to the University at Buffalo (New York, USA),[7] where he is currently Julian Park Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Affiliate Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Computer Science and Engineering, and Neurology. From 2002 to 2006 Smith served as founding Director of the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) in Leipzig, Germany.[8] The Institute moved to Saarbrücken in 2004.

In 2005 Smith founded the National Center for Ontological Research (NCOR), under the auspices of which he initiated in 2006 the Ontology for the Intelligence Community, subsequently STIDS,[9] conference series, and the International Conference on Biomedical Ontology (ICBO).[10][11]

From 1992 to 2016 Smith served as editor of The Monist: An International Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry.

Since 2016 he has served as editor of international standard ISO/IEC 21838: Top Level Ontologies. Part 1 of this standard[12] specifies the requirements for being a top-level (which means: domain-neutral) ontology. Part 2[13] is devoted to Basic Formal Ontology (BFO).

Since 2019 Smith is Visiting Professor at the University of Italian Switzerland.[14]

From the beginning of his career Smith has worked in the field of ontology, initially on the history of ontology as a sub-discipline of philosophy in the tradition of Brentano, Husserl, Ingarden and Reinach.[15] A special focus was on the theory of ontological dependence and part-whole relations proposed by Husserl[16][17] and applied by his students for example to the understanding of the ontology of mental and linguistic acts.[18] In 1984 he published together with Mulligan and Simons the paper "Truth-Makers".[19] This paper helped to launch truthmaker theory,[20][21][22] a still active research program at the borderlines of logic, semantics and philosophical ontology, based on a new understanding of the correspondence theory of truth.

In the 1990s he worked closely with David Mark, one of the founders of geographic information science (GIS), on initiatives in the field of geospatial ontology. In this connection he introduced the idea of fiat objects[23] to describe (typically rectangular) geospatial entities such as postal districts and real estate parcels which are not separated from their surroundings by any physical discontinuity. This terminology has been generalized into other fields.[24][25]

Since 2000 much of his research has been centered on the application of ontology in biomedical informatics, where he has worked on a variety of projects relating to biomedical terminologies and electronic health records.[26] He is a founding Coordinating Editor of the OBO Foundry[27] and has served as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Gene Ontology Consortium, and of the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI).[28] He contributes to the development of a number of biological and biomedical ontologies, including the Protein Ontology,[29] the Plant Ontology,[30] and others. Between 2005 and 2015 he was a co-PI of the NIH National Center for Biomedical Ontology[31]m where he was responsible especially for dissemination of ontology best practices and for providing training opportunities for biomedical ontologists.[32] Between 2013 and 2018 he served as ontology lead on the NIAID ImmPort project.[33][34]

Smith works also on the ontology of social reality, particularly in connection with the work of John Searle.[35] He serves as consultant to Hernando de Soto, Director of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Peru, on projects relating to the advancement of property and business rights among the poor in developing countries.

Since 2008 Smith has worked on ontology initiatives in the military and intelligence field. In 2008–2010 he served as technical lead on a project sponsored by the US Army Net-Centric Data Strategy Center of Excellence (ANCDS CoE) to create the Universal Core Semantic Layer (UCore-SL). Since 2010 he was worked on a series of initiatives sponsored by the US Army Intelligence and Information Warfare Directorate (I2WD) to create a framework for semantic enhancement of intelligence data in the Cloud. Since 2014 he is collaborator on initiatives of the US Air Force Research Laboratory on planning, mission assurance, and lifecycle management. In this connection he is working on a project to create a Joint Doctrine Ontology,[36] designed to enhance computational access to the contents of Joint Doctrine publications.[37]

Since 2016 Smith has been centrally involved in the Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) initiative.[38] which is creating a set of open ontologies to support the data needs of the manufacturing and engineering industries in a way that will advance data interoperability. Basic Formal Ontology, which serves as the top-level hub of the IOF, has been applied in the development of ontologies for maintenance,[39] supply chain,[40] product life cycle,[41] and additive manufacturing.[42]

• 1999 Fellow of the American Philosophical Society
• 2002 Wolfgang Paul Award, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation[43]
• 2010 First Paolo Bozzi Prize for Ontology, University of Turin[44]
• 2014 Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (FACMI)[45]

Leo Zaibert's The Theory and Practice of Ontology (2016)[46] and Gloria Zúñiga y Postigo and Gerald J. Erion's Barry Smith an sich (2017)[47] are Festschrifts dedicated to Smith containing studies of his work by colleagues and students.

Publications by Barry Smith, Cosmos + Taxis 4 (4):67-104 (2017)

• Barry Smith's faculty page at the University of Buffalo
• National Center for Ontological Research
• WorldCat au:Barry Smith (1952)