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Advances in field earn Smith Bozzi Prize
Barry Smith’s pioneering work in the field of ontology has earned him the inaugural Paola Bozzi Prize. Photo: DOUGLAS LEVERE
It’s not your father’s philosophy any more.
The discipline that traditionally has focused on such fundamental matters as the meaning of life, reason, existence and values has moved in the past few decades toward more real-world applications, contributing to a better understanding and management of the wider world in such fields as social ontology, bioinformatics and intelligence analysis, among others.
To recognize those advances in the discipline, Maurizio Ferraris, a faculty member at the University of Turin and leader in the field of social ontology, established the Paola Bozzi Prize in Ontology to honor a scholar who has made such notable contributions to the field. The prize is named for Paola Bozzi, a leading Italian psychologist and ontologist, whose life work reflects this shift in the discipline.
The inaugural Paola Bozzi Prize was awarded this spring at a special ceremony at the University of Turin. The recipient: UB faculty member Barry Smith.
While Smith, SUNY Distinguished Professor and Julian Park Professor of Philosophy at UB, has made groundbreaking contributions in all important areas of ontology, he is perhaps best known for his pioneering work in biomedical ontology, which develops common frameworks for integrating data across biological and clinical disciplines.
Chemists, biologists, pharmacologists, epidemiologists and researchers in the many subfields of clinical medicine each have their own systems for classifying and organizing data that do not have the same meaning for those in other biomedical disciplines. The fact that so much data cannot be shared in a comprehensive, meaningful way seriously impedes biomedical research.
Ontology, a discipline that lies at the interface of philosophy and information science, is designed to solve such problems by devising systems of communication in which there is a consistent meaning for terms used in different language systems and conceptual frameworks—thereby structuring data so that computers can use it.
A UB faculty member since 1993, Smith was one of the first researchers working to develop a sound biomedical ontology. He is founder and research director of IFOMIS, the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, which was the first to initiate a large-scale ontological research initiative in the biomedical sciences.
He also serves as director of the National Center for Ontology Research (NCOR), headquartered at UB and Stanford, and is a director of the Ontology Research Group in UB’s New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences. He is a founder of the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO), and a lead scientist on the Ontology for General Medical Science (OGMS), Protein Ontology (PRO) and Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) initiatives.
In addition, Smith works with the U.S. Army Net-Centric Data Strategy Center of Excellence on ontology-based data integration and reasoning, and with the U.S. Joint Forces Command as ontology project evaluator.
His work has received more than $7 million in funding since 2001—an enormous amount of funding for philosophical research. The awards include a $2.5 million Wolfgang Paul Award from Germany's Humboldt Foundation, believed to be the largest single prize ever awarded to a philosopher; a $1.1 million grant from the Volkswagen Foundation; and $535,000 from the European Union's 6th Framework Programme on Research and Technological Development.
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