BFO 2011
Basic Formal Ontology Editorial Meeting
Venue: Room B1-306, Ground Floor, Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences
Date: November 10-11, 2011
Goal of This Meeting
To define a strategy for the future maintenance of Basic Formal Ontology. To create a BFO Reference, designed as an authoritative documentation of the BFO ontology, including an updated version of the BFO 1.0 taxonomy together with the top level relations of the Relation Ontology. To define a strategy to create BFO OWL, including a treatment of temporal relations, based on BFO Reference.
Tentative Agenda
Thursday November 10
9:00am Strategy for Future Development of BFO (Moderator: WC)
- The BFO Reference
- Resolving the trade-off between global inferential consistency and local classificatory guidance
- Universals and particulars
- Granularity and vagueness
- Reductionism and perspectivalism
- Predications in the category of substance vs. predications in the category of accident
- Classes, universals, extensions, defined/attributive classes
- That 'Is_a' in BFO Reference (and in GO, and many other ontologies) does not mean the same as SubClassOf in OWL
- Vide TaillessMouse subClassOf: (not has-part some Tail)
- BFO-conformant extensions:
- Certain categories that used to have closure axioms no longer do because we recognize that there may be other subtypes.
- Governance process
- Rules for defined classes, abbreviations (disjunctions of convenience)
- Relations
- inside BFO
- outside BFO
- Formalization
- OWL, OBO, FOL
- Definitions
- Axioms
10:00am Coffee
10:15am Material entity (Moderator: WC)
- Object; fiat object part; object aggregate
- Conjoined twins
- Atoms, molecules
- Bodies of energy; fields; portions of matter
- Sites
- The Environment Ontology
- Geographical entities
- Object boundaries
- Spatial region boundaries
- Granularity
12:00pm Lunch
1pm BFO Dependent Continuant (Moderator: WC)
- Dependence, inherence
- Quality;
- Reciprocal quality pair
- Relational quality
- State
- Comparison of qualities
- Wavelength, frequency
- Realizable dependent continuant
- Disposition and its subcategories
- Reciprocal disposition pair
- Relational disposition
- Physical basis (cf. OGMS:Disorder)
- Generically dependent continuant (GDC)
- GDC as bearer of quality
2.30pm Break
2.45pm BFO Occurrent (Moderator WC)
- Predicates applied to processes
- The general strategy: processes have profiles as parts (e.g. beat profile, sound profile, ...) and when we predicate e.g. '60 bpm' of a heart beating process p, then we are asserting that p has a beat profile which instantiates the universal: 60bpm process.
- Rates
- Flows
- Relation to DOLCE theory of quality spaces
- Process profile universals and information artifacts
- Treatment of information artifacts such as peak current, peak voltage, etc.
- Course / life / history / projection
4:00-6:00pm Special session on Mental and Neurological Ontologies (Moderator: Alex Diehl)
- Janna Hastings: From brain science to mind science with the Mental Functioning Ontology (MFO)
- Werner Ceusters: The Mental Disease Ontology (MDO)
- Alex Diehl: The Neurological Disease Ontology (NDO)
Friday November 11
9am BFO OWL (Moderator AR)
- Relations, including short-cut relations
- Axioms relating to relations
10:00am Coffee
- Other aspects of BFO OWL
12:00pm Lunch
1:00pm Regions (Moderator WC)
- Spatial region
- Spatio-temporal and temporal region
- Region and frame of reference
- Incorporation of RCC8 and Allen Calculus?
3:00pm Final Session on Future Plans (Moderator BS)
- BFO-Reference
- Versioning
- Governance
Participants
- Thomas Bittner
- Mathias Brochhausen
- Werner Ceusters
- Alexander Cox
- Randall Dipert
- Alexander Diehl
- Albert Goldfain
- Janna Hastings
- Mark Jensen
- Fabian Neuhaus
- Mark Ressler
- Ron Rudnicki
- Alan Ruttenberg
- Stefan Schulz
- Barry Smith
- Neil Williams