Specification and user’s guide corresponding author: Barry Smith

Status of this document

Details of the OWL and CLIF(FOL) implementations of this specification can be found at:

BFO 2.0 OWL is a classes-only specification. The incorporation of core relations has been held over for a later version.

Details concerning automated support for migrating from BFO 1.1 to BFO 2.0 are available HERE .

2. Introduction

A domain is a portion of reality that forms the subject-matter of a single science or technology or mode of study; for example the domain of plant anatomy, of military targeting, of canon law. (Warning: We also use ‘Domain’ in the specification of BFO relations in what follows to refer to the type of entity which can serve as the subject – first term – of a relation.) BFO is designed to be neutral with regard to the domains to which it is applied in order to support the interoperation of what are called ‘domain ontologies’ defined on its basis and thus to support consistent annotation of data across different domains.

BFO supports formal (= logical) reasoning, and is associated with a set of common formal theories (for example of mereotopology [] and of qualitative spatial reasoning [], potentially also of numbers [58]), which do not need to be redeveloped for each successive domain. To this end, BFO must be capable of being applied to the creation of domain ontologies at lower levels, and in what follows we document how such application is to be effected. We describe the conditions which must be satisfied by entities of given sorts if they are properly to be categorized as instantiating the different universals or types (we use these terms interchangeably in what follows) recognized by BFO. To specify these conditions we will utilize a semi-formalized English that has approximately the expressivity of first-order logic (FOL) with identity. We use ‘category’ to refer to those universals at the most general and domain-neutral level. BFO treats only of categories in this sense. A category is a formal (= domain-neutral) universal, as contrasted with the material (domain-specific) universals represented in one or other domain ontology. BFO:fiat object part is a category in this sense; not however organism or weapon, or mortgage contract. Spatial, temporal and spatiotemporal region terms are counted as representing formal universals in this sense, since they apply in all domains.

In the formulations below, we will use:

‘b’, ‘c’, ‘d’, etc., for instances (spatio-temporal particulars);
‘t,’ ‘t’, etc., for temporal regions (instants or intervals)
‘r,’ ‘r’, ‘s,’ ‘s’, etc., for spatial and spatiotemporal regions,

We use ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘P’, etc. for universals. Note that ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘P’, etc. are common nouns (names for universals), rather than predicates. We use ‘instance_of’, ‘has_participant’ and similar bold-face expressions to express relations involving instances, and ‘part_of’ and similar italicized expressions to express relations exclusively involving universals. We also use italics to mark out BFO terms.

Figure 1: The BFO 2.0 is_a Hierarchy

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