Basic Formal Ontology

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Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a top-level ontology developed by Barry Smith and his associates for the purposes of promoting interoperability among domain ontologies built in its terms through a process of downward population. A guide to building BFO-conformant domain ontologies was published by MIT Press in 2015.^[1]

The ontology arose against the background of research in ontologies in the domain of geospatial information science by David Mark, Pierre Grenon, Achille Varzi and others,^[2] with a special role for the study of vagueness and of the ways sharp boundaries in the geospatial and other domains are created by fiat.^[3][4]

BFO has passed through four major releases, documented here. The current revision was released in 2020,^[5] and this forms the basis of the standard "ISO/IEC 21838-2"., which was released by the Joint Committee of the International Standards Organization and International Electrotechnical Commission in 2021.

The structure of BFO is based on a division of entities into two disjoint categories of continuant and occurrent, the former consists of objects and spatial regions, the latter contains processes conceived as extended through (or spanning) time. BFO thereby seeks to consolidate both time and space within a single framework.