Barry Smith (academic and ontologist)

Barry Smith ( born June 4, 1954 in Bury, England) is a mathematician and philosopher who works primarily in the fields of formal ontology and medical bioinformatics. He is the current editor of The Monist: An International Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry.

Academic career

Between 1970-1973 studied Smith mathematics and philosophy at the University of Oxford, he graduated with a Master of Sciences from; In 1976 he earned the degree of Ph.D. at the University of Manchester with a dissertation titled "The Ontology of Reference ". In this work, Smith examines the ontological presuppositions and consequences of referring to objects in the language. Between 1976 and 1994, followed by various positions at the University of Sheffield, University of Manchester and Liechtenstein.

Against the award of an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge to Jacques Derrida protested Smith in 1992 with an open letter in the Times.

1994 Smith finally got a chair as Julian Park Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo. He is also Adjunct Professor of Neurology there and Computer Science and a researcher at the Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences at the same university. 2002 to 2006 he was director of the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science ( IFOMIS ) with locations in Leipzig and Saarbrücken and has since been out there as a research director.

Research

Barry Smith's dissertation outlines an " ontology of reference ": Based on the well-established distinction between abstract and concrete types of objects, suggests Smith before, abstract objects and their use in connection to Frege's ontology, Husserl's theory of noemata and Leopold Lions home work on the representation of to interpret classes. The aim of this work is, among other things, necessary and sufficient conditions for objectuality show at all (especially in Ch. 12). To this end, Smith counts firstly, the possibility of a successful ligand " met " a reference to the corresponding entities ( within the meaning about the " knowledge by acquaintance " according to Russell), secondly, the existence of a field of predicates in the environment of proper names for the object in question (which in the sense of Michael Dummett independent objects of different linguistic entities ), thirdly, being embedded in a veridischen (rather than illusory ) epistemic context. In addition to the elaboration of the theory of objecthood Smith Goes inter alia, on problems of the philosophy of mathematics concerning a ontology of mathematical objects, to problems of interpretation among others of that classic of logic and phenomenology, on the approaches, inter alia, by Roman Ingarden and Paul Lorenzen, weaknesses in the ontology Alexius Meinong, as well as a number metaphilosophical issues and in particular on the definition of the relationship of phenomenology, logic and ontology.

The focus of the research of Barry Smith is in the range of ontology ( computer science ) and its applications, especially in medical bioinformatics. In this area he has worked on various projects for biomedical terminology and to electronic health records. He is the head of the Basic Formal Ontology project, coordinating editor of the Open Biomedical Ontologies Foundry and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Gene Ontology Consortium, and the Working Group Ontology for Biomedical Investigations ( OBI). The NCOR ( National Center for Ontological Research) was co-founded by Smith in 2005. Since 2006, the conference series Ontology for the Intelligence Community and STIDS there are held. From Smith also took the initiative for the International Conference on Biomedical Ontology.

Prices, promotions

Smith was awarded the Wolfgang -Paul Prize of the Humboldt Foundation and the Paolo Bozzi price for ontology of the University of Turin.

Smith's research has raised a number of grants, including the National Institutes of Health, the National Research production in the U.S., Switzerland and Austria, the Humboldt Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, the European Union, and the U.S. Department of Defense.

The economist Hernando de Soto, founder and director of the Instituto de Libertad y Democracia in Lima, he has worked for the ontology of property rights and social development, he is also an advisor to the Intelligence and Information Warfare Directorate of the U.S. Army for ontology-based technologies.

Publications (selection)

From Smith submitted more than 500 publications.

  • Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano, Chicago LaSalle: Open Court, 1994.
  • Structure and form: Philosophy and Literature in Austria -Hungary and Her Successor States, 1981.
  • Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology, Munich: Philosophia, 1982.
  • Foundations of Gestalt Theory, Munich: Philosophia, 1988.
  • Adolf Reinach, Complete Works. Critical Edition with Commentary, Volume I: The works, part I: critical edition (1905-1914), Part II: Unpublished Texts (1906-1917); ( with Karl Schuhmann :) Volume II: Comments and textual criticism, Munich: Philosophia 1989.
  • ( with Hans Burkhardt) Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology, Munich: Philosophia, 1991.
  • ( with David W. Smith) The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, Cambridge / New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
  • ( Berit Brogaard with ) Rationality and Irrationality, Wien: öbv & hpt, 2001.
  • ( with Christopher Welty ) Formal Ontology in Information Systems, New York: ACM Press, 2001.
  • John Searle, Cambridge / New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
  • ( with David Mark and Isaac Ehrlich) The Mystery of Capital and the Construction of Social Reality, Chicago: Open Court, 2008.
  • Biomedical ( with Ludger Jansen ) ontology. Knowledge structure for computer science use, Zurich: vdf, 2008.
  • ( with Katherine Munn ) Applied Ontology: An Introduction, 2008.
  • Pierre Grenon, Barry Smith: Foundations of an ontology of philosophy, synthesis, 182/2, 2001, pp. 185-204. doi: 10.1007/s11229-009-9658-x
  • Barry Smith, Austrian Economics and Austrian Philosophy " (PDF file, 6.08 MB ), in W. Grassl and B. Smith (ed.) Austrian Economics: Historical and Philosophical Background, Routledge, London, 2010, 1-36.
  • Pierre Grenon and Barry Smith, SNAP and SPAN: Towards Dynamic Spatial Ontology, in: Spatial Cognition and Computation, 4 ( 1 ), 2004, 69-103.
  • Barry Smith, Beyond Concepts, or: Ontology as Reality Representation ( PDF file, 74 kB) ", in: Achille Varzi and Laure Vieu (eds.): Formal Ontology and Information Systems. Proceedings of the Third International Conference (FOIS 2004), IOS Press, Amsterdam 2004, 73-84.
  • Barry Smith, Dirk Siebert, Werner Ceusters: What philosophical ontology can contribute to biomedical computer science (PDF, 66 kB), in: Information Science & Practice, 55 (2004) 3, pp. 143-146
  • Barry Smith, Ontology (PDF file, 61 kB) ", in Luciano Floridi (ed.), Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, 155-166.
  • Barry Smith and David M. Mark, "Do Mountains Exist? Towards an Ontology of Landforms, " Environment and Planning B ( Planning and Design ), 30 (3 ), 2003, 411-427.
  • Barry Smith, " Fiat Objects ," Topoi, 20: 2 ( September 2001), 131-148.
  • Smity Barry, David M. Mark: " Geographical categories: an ontological investigation", in:. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 15/ 7, 2001 doi: 10.1080/13658810110061199
  • Barry Smith and Achille Varzi, " Fiat and Bona Fide Boundaries", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60 ( 2 ), 2000, 401-420.
  • Barry Smith " Mereotopology: A theory of parts and boundaries ," Data & Knowledge Engineering, 20/ 3, 1996, pp. 287-303. doi: 10.1016/S0169-023X (96 ) 00015-8
  • Barry Smith, "On Drawing Lines on a Map ', in Andrew U. Frank and Werner Kuhn (eds. ), Spatial Information Theory. A Theoretical Basis for GIS (LNCS 988), Berlin / Heidelberg / New York, etc.: Springer, 1995, 475-484.
  • Kevin Mulligan, Peter M. Simons and Barry Smith, "Truth - Makers ', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 44 (1984 ), 287-321.
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