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Jie Zheng edited this page Jun 19, 2015 · 2 revisions

NEWS! A draft of BFO2, for community discussion, is now available. See the release notes at

http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/bfo/2012-07-20/ReleaseNotes

The version can be accessed at

For users of the prototype BFO 2 that was used in the OBO format project, you can import that version from

http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/bfo.owl

Tutorial material is available:

  • Materials from a tutorial at the University at Buffalo in mid August. Includes videos of the sessions.
  • Slides from the Graz ICBO 2012 BFO2 tutorial - Part 1, BFO 2,Part 2, BFO 2 OWL Implementation

About Basic Formal Ontology (BFO)

BFO, the Basic Formal Ontology, grew out of a philosophical orientation, which overlapped with that of DOLCE and SUMO. Unlike these, however, it is narrowly focused on the task of providing a genuine upper ontology to be used in support of domain ontologies developed for scientific research, as for example in biomedicine within the framework of the OBO Foundry, a library ontologies for biology and medicine. Thus BFO does not contain any term which would properly fall within the special sciences domains. The BFO project was initiated in 2002. The theory behind BFO was initially developed by Barry Smith and Pierre Grenon. Important contributions to BFO have been made by many people, including: Werner Ceusters, Chris Mungall, Fabian Neuhaus, Holger Stenzhorn, Alan Ruttenberg, Mathias Brochhausen, Bjoern Peters, Kerry Trentelman, and by more than hundred other members of the BFO Discussion Group. The BFO versions 1.0 and 1.1 were limited to taxonomic hierarchies of mutually exclusive nodes, representing domain-independent universals.

Now, ten years after BFO’s first steps, a new and significantly enhanced version is in the final stage of its development. While BFO 2 maintains most of the original taxonomic structure, it additionally adds a set of relations and related axioms.

There are three sources that define BFO 2:

  1. the BFO 2 Reference: This is a text document that extensively describes the ontology using English text, enhanced by formal definitions. This document is currently available at http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/bfo/2012-07-20/Reference
  2. BFO 2 in first order logic (CLIF format). This version is still under development.
  3. BFO 2 in OWL DL. The Graz version can be accessed at http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/bfo/2012-07-20/bfo.owl

The three versions share their free text and logical definitions and elucidations, as well as examples from various scientific domains. Axioms are identified by unique identifiers referred to by the different formats as identified in the specification document.

The BFO home page is http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/bfo. From that page you can access our repository and information about the development processes, mailing lists, etc. Note that the previous BFO Home page at http://www.ifomis.org/bfo represents work prior to BFO 2 and that we will be consolidating the two sites in the near future.

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