Building Blocks - Basic Formal Ontology (BFO)

This repository provides OGC Building Blocks for the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), a top-level ontology conformant to ISO/IEC 21838-1 requirements.

Overview

Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a top-level ontology designed to support information retrieval, analysis and integration in scientific and other domains. BFO is:

• ISO Standard: Conformant to ISO/IEC 21838-2:2020
• Widely Adopted: Used by 400+ ontologies in biomedicine, industry, and other domains
• Domain-Neutral: Provides a common framework applicable across all scientific disciplines
• Well-Documented: Extensive documentation and training materials available

Building Blocks

BFO Core

The main building block provides access to the BFO 2020 core ontology including:

• Classes: Entity, Continuant, Occurrent, MaterialEntity, Process, Quality, Role, etc.
• Relations: part_of, has_part, participates_in, located_in, etc.
• Formal Axiomatization: OWL2, Common Logic (CLIF), and Prover9 formats

Identifier: ogc.bfo.core
Status: Under development
Version: 2020

Usage

JSON-LD Context

The building block provides a JSON-LD context mapping BFO terms to their IRIs:

{
  "@context": "https://ogcincubator.github.io/bblocks-bfo/_sources/bfo/context.jsonld",
  "@type": "MaterialEntity",
  "@id": "http://example.org/organism/001",
  "label": "Example Organism",
  "has_quality": [{
    "@type": "Quality",
    "label": "mass"
  }]
}

Key BFO Classes

• Entity (bfo:0000001): The root of all BFO classes
• Continuant (bfo:0000002): Entities that persist through time
• Occurrent (bfo:0000003): Entities that unfold through time
• MaterialEntity (bfo:0000040): Physical objects and their aggregates
• Process (bfo:0000015): Occurrents that have temporal parts
• Quality (bfo:0000019): Dependent continuants that are qualities
• Role (bfo:0000023): Realizable entities that are roles
• Function (bfo:0000034): Realizable entities that are functions

Standards and References

ISO Standard

• ISO/IEC 21838-2:2020: Information technology — Top-level ontologies (TLO) — Part 2: Basic Formal Ontology (BFO)

Resources

• BFO 2020 GitHub Repository
• BFO Documentation
• Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology (MIT Press)
• OBO Foundry
• Industrial Ontologies Foundry

Related Building Blocks

• Common Core Ontologies (CCO)

License

The BFO ontology is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

Development Team

BFO Core Team

• Barry Smith - SUNY Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University at Buffalo
• Alan Ruttenberg - University at Buffalo
• John Beverley - Assistant Professor, University at Buffalo

Building Blocks Implementation

This OGC Building Blocks implementation provides a standardized way to integrate BFO into OGC-compliant systems and workflows.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please refer to:

• BFO Issue Tracker
• BFO-CCO Office Hours - Biweekly meetings on alternate Fridays at 11am EST

Contact

For questions about BFO, contact:

• John Beverley: johnbeve@buffalo.edu
• NCOR (National Center for Ontological Research)