Re: Degree of acceptance of BFO

>>>>> "ED" == Emanuele D'Arrigo <manu3d@gmail.com> writes:

  ED> Hi everybody,

  ED> while reading the 132 pages PDF manual of BFO
  ED> (http://www.ifomis.uni-saarland.de/projects/bfo/manual/) I've been
  ED> wondering how widely used/accepted such recommendation is, as the basis
  ED> of any ontology.  Is it a proposal, a de-facto standard, a good starting
  ED> point?



BFO has a reasonably degree of take up within the biological ontologies. At
the moment, it is not heavily used in the older ontologies which are largely
the ones that people are using, but in the more recent additions. 

I'm not sure how you would distinguish between de-facto standard and
proposal. It's not going through any formal standardisation process to my
knowledge, but then this is true of most biological ontologies, and therefore
many of the ontologies in use. It is being actively worked on, having a few
people directly working on it, an active mailing list and feedback from people
building ontologies using it (OBI in particular). 

Is it a good starting point? Well, it depends what you want to do. It's uses a
3D plus time view of the world. It has quite a limited scope representing
"real-world" entities only; so it doesn't really support abstraction over
models. It doesn't define dimensions, numbers or other such things.

Finally, it's primary representation is stated to be as first order logic,
rather than OWL. The OWL representation on their website is a property-less
asserted hierarchy.

Well, like I say, depends what you are doing. 

Phil

Received on Tuesday, 2 October 2007 14:49:05 UTC