Abstract

This month’s APA Blog Substack Newsletter extends a discussion with Barry Smith, who is a Distinguished Julian Park Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Biomedical Informatics, and Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo. He is also Director of the National Center for Ontological Research and a lead developer of Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), an international standard top-level ontology (ISO/IEC 21838-2) used by over 700 ontology development groups across the world. Barry’s work led to the formation in 2005 of the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry, a set of resources designed to support information-driven research in biology and biomedicine. He also contributes to ontology projects in the military and security domains and is one of the founders of the Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF), whose goal is to advance interoperability of information systems in the industrial domain. Now he and his University at Buffalo (UB) colleague and Co-Director of the National Center for Ontological Research John Beverley lead what one might call the academic arm of the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community Working Group (DIOWG), in which the principles of the OBO Foundry are being applied in the defense and security domains.