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Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology

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Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology

MIT Press,

15 min read
8 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

Ontologies organize scientific information in ways that can be used by digital technologies.

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Recommendation

In today’s digital world, just about everything is data-driven. Serious scientific research, in particular, produces overwhelming amounts of information that requires computer analysis. In this guide, researchers Robert Arp, Barry Smith, and Andrew D. Spear explain how applied ontology serves this goal by enabling those in fields such as biomedical informatics to leverage a common format for diverse data and use it across various platforms. Their text unpacks the core principles underpinning digital ontologies that work across diverse research fields.

Summary

Modern science produces overwhelming quantities of data.

Everyone today, at least in developed countries, lives in an information-driven world. The way people work, how they manage their finances, how they get around, and how they enjoy themselves are all shaped by digital technologies at varying levels of sophistication. Science has also been transformed by increasingly powerful digital technologies, and nowhere is that more evident than in the life sciences. At this point, serious life science research is generating massive amounts of data thanks to new gene sequencing technologies and multidimensional imaging technologies for everything from cells to whole brains.

Computers can store vast amounts of data and analyze it at levels of complexity, scale, and speed far beyond the capacities of individual humans. Thus, scientists must be able to store and integrate new data with existing knowledge and organize it in ways that make it readily retrievable and understandable to both computers and humans. They must also be able to share it with others, across several platforms. Given the speed with which information technologies are changing and advancing, and the fact...

About the Authors

Robert Arp is a senior research analyst for the US Army who has worked on ontologies for the US Air Force and the National Institutes of Health. Barry Smith is a SUNY, Buffalo, distinguished professor of philosophy and the director of the National Center for Ontological Research. Andrew D. Spear is an associate professor of philosophy at Grand Valley State University, Michigan. 

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