Introduction to Basic Formal Ontology
introduction to BFO History - OBO, CCO, IOF, ISO... BFO versioning history
Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a top-level ontology designed to support information integration, retrieval, and analysis across all domains of scientific investigation. Containing only general terms common across disciplines, BFO serves as the top-level ontology of the Open Biomedical and Bioinformatic Ontology (OBO) Foundry and the Industrial Ontology Foundry (IOF).
BFO provides a starting point for over 500 open-source ontology projects covering more specific domains, such as infectious disease, plant development, and processed materials. BFO has been designated an ISO standard and BFO’s ISO 21838-2 specification has been axiomatized in First-Order Logic, OWL 2, and CLIF.
BFO is committed to the following principles, which distinguish it from other top-level ontologies:
Ontological Realism - The goal of an ontology is to describe reality. Scientific investigation is concerned with general features of reality and relations among them. Consequently, BFO consists fundamentally of rep- resentations of reality rather than merely language, concepts, or mental representations about reality.
Fallibilism - Whereas universals themselves do not change, our under- standing of them must in light of new discoveries. While present scien- tific theories are assumed to be our best sources of accurate statements about reality, BFO recognizes, of course, that present scientific theories may be incorrect. Consequently, BFO is committed to tracking scientific developments over time, and updating ontologies in accordance with sci- entific developments.
Adequatism - Entities in a domain should not be assumed to be reducible to other kinds of entities. All scientific disciplines are worthy of repre- sentation in their own terms, and it is not necessary to paraphrase talk of these entities in terms of a privileged set of entities (e.g. those described by physics). This commitment contrasts with reductionism, which seeks to reduce entities described by some domain of science to another deemed more fundamental.
Perspectivalism - Reality is complex and multifaceted, and no single scientific discipline can completely cover all of its aspects. Perspectivalism amounts to the principle that two distinct scientific theories may both be equally accurate representations of one and the same reality. For example, it is equally legitimate to examine living organisms from a perspective of molecular biology as from a perspective that takes into account anatomy and physiology at the level of organs and organ systems. Each of the mentioned perspectives can yield contributions to our knowledge of reality that are accurate to the reality at hand.