Barry Smith

We begin at the beginning, with an outline of Aristotle’s views on ontology and with a discussion of the influence of these views on Linnaeus. We move from there to consider the data standardization initiatives launched in the nineteenth century and then turn to investigate how the idea of computational ontologies developed in the AI and knowledge representation communities in the closing decades of the twentieth century. We show how aspects of this idea, particularly those relating to the use of the term “concept” in ontology development, influenced SNOMED CT and other medical terminologies. Against this background, we then show how the Foundational Model of Anatomy, the Gene Ontology, Basic Formal Ontology, and other OBO Foundry ontologies came into existence and discuss their role in the development of contemporary biomedical informatics.

Since 1950, when Alan Turing proposed what has since come to be called the Turing test, the ability of a machine to pass this test has established itself as the primary hallmark of general AI. To pass the test, a machine would have to be able to engage in dialogue in such a way that a human interrogator could not distinguish its behaviour from that of a human being. AI researchers have attempted to build machines that could meet this requirement, but they have so far failed. To pass the test, a machine would have to meet two conditions: (i) react appropriately to the variance in human dialogue and (ii) display a human-like personality and intentions. We argue, first, that it is for mathematical reasons impossible to program a machine which can master the enormously complex and constantly evolving pattern of variance which human dialogues contain. And second, that we do not know how to make machines that possess personality and intentions of the sort we find in humans. Since a Turing machine cannot master human dialogue behaviour, we conclude that a Turing machine also cannot possess what is called ``general'' Artificial Intelligence. We do, however, acknowledge the potential of Turing machines to master dialogue behaviour in highly restricted contexts, where what is called ``narrow'' AI can still be of considerable utility.

Building on the writings of Wittgenstein on rule-following and deviance, Kristof Nyiri advanced a theory of creativity as consisting in a fusion of conflicting rules or disciplines. Only such fusion can produce something that is both intrinsically new and yet capable of being apprehended by and passed on to a wider community. Creativity, on this view, involves not the breaking of rules, or the deliberate cultivation of deviant social habits, but rather the acceptance of enriched systems of rules, the adherence to which presupposes ...

When economist Hernando de Soto published The Mystery of Capital in 2000, its author made (on page 221) a single seemingly insubstantial reference to philosopher John Searle's The Construction of Social Reality, which had appeared in 1995. Nobody need have paid attention to this fleeting citation, particularly because the other philosophers referenced in support of de Soto's claims���Popper, Dennett, Foucault, Derrida���constitute quite a philosophical hodgepodge. It required a catalyst at the time who worked on ...

Die Philosophiegeschichte liefert verschiedene Ansatzpunkte f-ur die Behandlung der Frage nach dem Wesen von sozialen Objekten. Auf der einen Seite gibt es holistische und realistische Ontologien des Sozialen. Fur Heidegger z. B. sind Menschen keine isolierten Individuen sondern durch Andere, durch Werkzeuge, durch Traditionen verstrickt in eine Mitwelt, die nur als Ganzes existiert. Eine holistische Auffassung des Sozialen findet man auch bei Wittgenstein, der soziale Institutionen als Teile der Naturgeschiclite des ...

I shall presuppose as undefended background to what follows a position of scientific realism, a doctrine to the effect (i) that the world exists and (ii) that through the working out of ever more sophisticated theories our scientific picture of reality will approximate ever more closely to the world as it really is. Against this background consider, now, the following question: 1. Do the empirical theories with the help of which we seek to approximate a good or true picture of reality rest on any non-empirical presuppositions? One can answer this ...

Changes in an upper level ontology have obvious consequences for the domain ontologies that use it at lower levels. It is therefore crucial to document the changes made between successive versions of ontologies of this kind. We describe and apply a method for tracking, explaining and measuring changes between successive versions of upper level ontologies such as the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). The proposed change-tracking method extends earlier work on Realism- Based Ontology Versioning (RBOV) and Evolutionary Terminology Auditing (ETA). We describe here the application of this evaluation method to changes between BFO 1.0, BFO 1.1, and BFO 2.0. We discuss the issues raised by this application and describe the extensions which we added to the original evaluation schema in order to account for changes in this type of ontology. The results of our study show that BFO has undergone eight types of changes that can be systematically explained by the extended evaluation schema. Finally, we...

... But of course, this concedes that thinking cannot be simply symbol manipulation.” (129 ... mental competence leave off?” Harnad believes that symbolic functions must be grounded in “robotic ... Many responses to the Chinese Room argument have noted that, as with Leibniz' Mill, the ...

Despite a large and multifaceted effort to understand the vast landscape of phenotypic data, their current form inhibits productive data analysis. The lack of a community-wide, consensus-based, human- and machine-interpretable language for describing phenotypes and their genomic and environmental contexts is perhaps the most pressing scientific bottleneck to integration across many key fields in biology, including genomics, systems biology, development, medicine, evolution, ecology, and systematics. Here we survey the current phenomics landscape, including data resources and handling, and the progress that has been made to accurately capture relevant data descriptions for phenotypes. We present an example of the kind of integration across domains that computable phenotypes would enable, and we call upon the broader biology community, publishers, and relevant funding agencies to support efforts to surmount…

Introduction In their paper “Sixteen Days” Barry Smith and Berit Brogaard try to answer the question: when does a human being begin to exist? In this paper we will address some methodological issues connected with this exercise in ontology. We shall begin by sketching the ...

Abstract���The Joint Battle Management Language (JBML) is an XML-based language designed to allow Command and Control (C2) systems to interface easily with Modeling and Simulation (M&S) systems. While some of the XML-tags defined in this language correspond to types of entities that exist in reality, others are mere syntactic artifacts used to structure the messages themselves. Because these two kinds of tags are not formally distinguishable, JBML messages in effect confuse data with what the data represent. In this paper we show ...

We have begun work on two separate but related ontologies for the study of neurological diseases. The first, the Neurological Disease Ontology (ND), is intended to provide a set of controlled, logically conH nected classes to describe the range of neurological diseases and their associated signs and symptoms, assessments, diagnoses, and intervenH tions that are encountered in the course of clinical practice. ND is built as an extension of the Ontology for General Medical Sciences K a highH level candidate OBO ...

Die medizinische Ontologie soll helfen, die Flut medizinischer Information soweit zu kanalisieren, dass sie ohne Vereinfachungen oder Verzerrungen computergest��tzt verarbeitet werden kann. Nach ontologischen Kriterien aufbereitete Terminologiesysteme sollen dar��ber hinaus die Integration von Daten aus heterogenen Quellen unterst��tzen. Das im Jahr 2002 an der Universit��t Leipzig gegr��ndete Forschungsinstitut IFOMIS stellt sich der Aufgabe, das g��ngige Instrumentarium der medizinischen Informatik mit Mitteln der ...

Abstract. We propose an ontological theory that is powerful enough to describe both complex spatio-temporal processes and the enduring entities that participate in such processes. For this purpose we distinguish between ontologies and metaontology. Ontologies are based on very simple directly depicting languages and fall into two major categories: ontologies of type SPAN and ontologies of type SNAP. These represent two complementary perspectives on reality and result in distinct though compatible systems of categories. In a SNAP (snapshot) ontology ...

In the age of computers as boxes there arose the doctrine of methodological solipsism���also sometimes called ���cognitivism��� or ���representationalism���(the differences do not matter here)���a doctrine that is commonly associated with the name of Fodor. 2 In order to understand a mind, on this doctrine���that is, in order to establish in scientific fashion the laws governing mental processes���you need to abstract away from all relations to any real-world objects toward which these mental processes might be directed. One should for methodological ...

More than forty years after Gilbert Ryle published his paper on" Knowing How and Knowing That" in 1945, 1 the problem of practical knowledge has still failed to establish for itself a secure position in the field of problems dealt with by analytic philosophers. Thus even today it can safely be asserted that it is discursive or theoretical knowledge, knowledge linguistically expressed, above all knowledge in the form of propositions, that holds centre stage in analytic treatments of epistemology and cognition. The present volume, which ...

While contemporary philosophers have devoted vast amounts of attention to the language we use in describing and finding our way about the world of everyday experience, they have, with few exceptions, refused to see this world itself as a fitting object of theoretical concern. In what follows I shall seek to show how the commonsensical world might be treated ontologically as an object of investigation in its own right. At the same time I shall seek to establish how such a treatment might help us better philosophically to understand ...

We propose the beginnings of a general theory of environments, of the parts or regions of space in which organisms live and move. We draw on two sources: on the one hand on recent work on the ontology of space; and on the other hand on work by ecological scientists on concepts such as territory, habitat, and niche. 1. Environments: Types and Tokens An environment is in first approximation a volume of space; it is a specific habitat, location, or site that is suitable or adequate for given purposes (of foraging, resting, hunting, breeding, nesting, grooming) in the life of an organism or group of organisms. This spatial notion of environment can be drawn closer to biological and ecological science by taking account of the pertinent physical attributes realized within given spatial regions. Each type of organism is associated with a certain array of environmental conditions, for example: degree of slope, exposure to sunlight, soil fertility, foliage density, size, proximity and type o...

Suppose you own a garden-variety object such as a hat or a shirt. Your property right then follows the ageold saw according to which possession is nine-tenths of the law. That is, your possession of a shirt constitutes a strong presumption in favor of your ownership of the shirt. In the case of land, however, this is not the case. Here possession is not only not a strong presumption in favor of ownership; it is not even clear what possession is. Possessing a thing like a hat or a shirt is a rather straightforward affair: the person wearing the hat or shirt possesses the shirt or the hat. But what is possession in the case of land? This essay seeks to provide an answer to this question in the form of an ontology of landed property.

Given the assertion of a relation between two types, like: “Epidermis has part some Keratinocyte”, we define silent change as any kind of change of the instance-relata of the relation in question that does not change the truth-value of the respective type-level assertion. Such assertions are notoriously difficult to model in OWL 2. To address this problem, we distinguish different modes of type-level relatedness giving rise to this problem and describe a conservative extension to the BFO top-level ontology that allows expressing these modes.

<p>Phenotype data are relevant to many different domains, but they are currently isolated in data “silos.” Research from a broad array of seemingly disconnected domains, as outlined here, can be dramatically accelerated with a computable data store. (<b>A</b>) <b>Domains</b>: Diverse fields such as evolutionary biology, human disease and medicine, and climate change relate to phenotypes. (<b>B</b>) <b>Phenotypes</b>: insects, vertebrates, plants, and even forests all have features that are branched in some way, but they are described using different terms. For a computer to discover this, the phenotypes must be annotated with unique identifiers from ontologies that are logically linked. Under “shape” in the PATO quality ontology <a href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002033#pbio.1002033-Gkoutos1" target="_blank">[106]</a>, “branchiness” is an encompassing parent term with subtypes “branched” and “increased branchiness.” From left to right, top layer, insects, vertebrates and plants have species that demonstrate phenotypes for which the genetic basis is not known. Often their companion model species, however, have experimental genetic work that is relevant to proposing candidate genes and gene networks. Insects (1): An evolutionary novelty in bees (top layer) is the presence of branched setae used for pollen collection. Nothing is known about the genetic basis of this feature. One clue to the origin of this evolutionary feature comes from studies of <i>Drosophila</i> (bottom layer), where <i>Mical</i> overexpression in unbranched wild-type bristles generates a branched morphology <a href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002033#pbio.1002033-Hung1" target="_blank">[119]</a>. Mical directly links semaphorins and their plexin receptors to the precise control of actin filament dynamics <a href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002033#pbio.1002033-Hung1" target="_blank">[119]</a>. Vertebrates (2): In humans, aberrant angiogenesis, including excessive blood vessel branching (top layer), is one of the six central hallmarks of cancer <a href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002033#pbio.1002033-Hanahan1" target="_blank">[121]</a>. Candidate genes have been identified using data from model organisms. In zebrafish (middle layer), studies of the control of sprouting in blood vessel development show that signaling via semaphorins <a href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002033#pbio.1002033-Yazdani1" target="_blank">[122]</a> and their plexin receptors is required for proper abundance and distribution <a href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002033#pbio.1002033-Gu1" target="_blank">[123]</a>; disruption of <i>plxnd1</i> results in increased branching <a href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002033#pbio.1002033-Alvarez1" target="_blank">[120]</a>,<a href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002033#pbio.1002033-Zygmunt1" target="_blank">[124]</a>,<a href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002033#pbio.1002033-TorresVazquez1" target="_blank">[125]</a>. In mouse (bottom layer), branching of salivary glands is dependent on semaphorin signaling <a href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002033#pbio.1002033-Chung1" target="_blank">[126]</a>, as is the branching of various other epithelial organs <a href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002033#pbio.1002033-Korostylev1" target="_blank">[127]</a>. Plants (3): The uppermost canopy of trees of the rainforest (top layer) undergo a marked increase in branching associated with climate change <a href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002033#pbio.1002033-Niinemets1" target="_blank">[128]</a>. Nothing is known about the genetic basis of this feature. The branching of plant trichomes (bottom layer), tiny outgrowths with a variety of functions including seed dispersal, has been studied in the model <i>Arabidopsis thaliana.</i> Branching occurs in association with many MYB-domain genes <a href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002033#pbio.1002033-Serna1" target="_blank">[129]</a>, transcription factors that are found in both plants and animals <a href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002033#pbio.1002033-Rosinski1" target="_blank">[130]</a>. (<b>C</b>) <b>Environment</b>: Diverse input from the environment influences organismal phenotype. (<b>D</b>) <b>Genes</b>: At the genetic level, previously unknown associations with various types of “branchiness” between insects and vertebrates are here made to possibly a common core or network of genes (the semaphorin-plexin signaling network). No association between genes associated with plant…

The theory of document acts is an extension of the more traditional theory of speech acts advanced by Austin and Searle. It is designed to do justice to the ways in which documents can be used to bring about a variety of effects in virtue of the fact that, where speech is evanescent, documents are continuant entities. This means that documents can be preserved in such a way that they can be inspected and modified at successive points in time and grouped together into enduring document complexes. We outline some components of a theory of document acts, and show how it can throw light on certain problems in Searle's ontology of social reality.