Barry Smith is a Julian Park Distinguished Professor of Philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 in the University at Buffalo

University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, also commonly known as the University at Buffalo or UB, is a public research university and a "University Center" in the State University of New York system. The university was founded by Millard Fillmore in 1846. UB has multiple campuses...

 (New York, USA) and Research Scientist in the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences. From 2002 to 2006 he was Director of the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) in Leipzig

Leipzig

Leipzig Leipzig has always been a trade city, situated during the time of the Holy Roman Empire at the intersection of the Via Regia and Via Imperii, two important trade routes. At one time, Leipzig was one of the major European centres of learning and culture in fields such as music and publishing...

 and Saarbrücken

Saarbrücken

Saarbrücken is the capital of the state of Saarland in Germany. The city is situated at the heart of a metropolitan area that borders on the west on Dillingen and to the north-east on Neunkirchen, where most of the people of the Saarland live....

, GermaUny. Since 2007 he acts as Research Director of IFOMIS.

He is the author of some 450 scientific publications, including 15 authored or edited books, and editor of The Monist

The Monist

The Monist: An International Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry is an American academic journal in the field of philosophy. It was founded in October 1890 by Edward C. Hegeler, making it one of the longest-established journals in philosophy...

: An International Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry. His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health

National Institutes of Health

The National Institutes of Health are an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and are the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and health-related research. Its science and engineering counterpart is the National Science Foundation...

, the US

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, Swiss

Switzerland

Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

 and Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

n National Science Foundations, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the European Union

European Union

The European Union is an economic and political union of 27 independent member states which are located primarily in Europe. The EU traces its origins from the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community , formed by six countries in 1958...

. In 2002 he received in recognition of his scientific achievements the Wolfgang Paul Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation

Alexander von Humboldt Foundation

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation is a foundation set-up by the government of the Federal Republic and funded by the German Foreign Office, the Ministry of Education and Research, the Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development and others for the promotion of international co-operation...

. In 2010 he received the first Paolo Bozzi Prize for Ontology from the University of Turin.

Smith authored a letter to The Times

The Times

The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

 concerning Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...

 receiving an honorary degree

Honorary degree

An honorary degree or a degree honoris causa is an academic degree for which a university has waived the usual requirements, such as matriculation, residence, study, and the passing of examinations...

 from Cambridge University, in which he set out numerous reasons why he did not support this prospect.

He is leader of the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) project, a Coordinating Editor of the OBO Foundry and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Gene Ontology

Gene Ontology

The Gene Ontology, or GO, is a major bioinformatics initiative to unify the representation of gene and gene product attributes across all species...

 Consortium, the OBI (Ontology for Biomedical Investigations) Working Group, and of the Cleveland Clinic Semantic Database.

Smith's research focus is ontology

Ontology

Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...

 and its applications, especially in biomedicine

Biomedicine

Biomedicine is a branch of medical science that applies biological and other natural-science principles to clinical practice,. Biomedicine, i.e. medical research, involves the study of physiological processes with methods from biology, chemistry and physics. Approaches range from understanding...

 and biomedical informatics, where he is working on a variety of projects relating to biomedical terminologies and electronic health records. He is also collaborating with Hernando de Soto

Hernando de Soto (economist)

Hernando de Soto is a Peruvian economist known for his work on the informal economy and on the importance of business and property rights. He is the president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy , located in Lima, Peru.-Childhood and education:Hernando de Soto was born in 1941 in Arequipa,...

, Director of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy

Institute for Liberty and Democracy

The Institute for Liberty and Democracy is a Lima-based think tank devoted to the promotion of property rights in developing countries...

 in Lima

Lima

Lima is the capital and the largest city of Peru. It is located in the valleys of the Chillón, Rímac and Lurín rivers, in the central part of the country, on a desert coast overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Together with the seaport of Callao, it forms a contiguous urban area known as the Lima...

, Peru

Peru

Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....

, on the ontology of property rights and social development.

External links

• Introduction to Biomedical Ontology in Eight Lectures (Streaming Video)
• The OBO Foundry: Coordinated Evolution of Ontologies to Support Biomedical Data Integration
• Barry Smith's faculty page at the University of Buffalo
• Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science
• The OBO Foundry
• Basic Formal Ontology