Barry Smith (born 4 June 1952) is an Anglo-American philosopher researching in the field of applied ontology.

Education From 1970 to 1973, Smith studied Mathematics and Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He obtained his PhD from the University of Manchester in 1976 for a dissertation on ontology and reference in Husserl and Frege. The dissertation was supervised by Wolfe Mays.

Among the cohort of graduate students supervised by Mays in Manchester at that time were Kevin Mulligan (Geneva/Lugano), and Peter Simons (Trinity College, Dublin). Both shared with Smith an interest in analytic metaphysics and in the contributions of turn-of-the-century Continental philosophers and logicians to central issues of analytic philosophy.Mark Textor (ed.), The Austrian Contribution to Analytic Philosophy, Routledge, 2006. .Thomas Uebel, "The Neurath-Haller Thesis and the Return of Analytic Philosophy to Austria", Grazer Philosophische Studien, Grazer Philosophische Studien, 101 (2024) 249–276 . In 1979 they together founded the Seminar for Austro-German Philosophy,Axel Bühler, "Drei Briten in Kakanien", Information Philosophie, 3 (1987), 22–33. which organized workshops and conferences centered around the work of early Central European philosophers from Bolzano to Tarski and their impact on subsequent generations. A central role in this respect was played by Husserl's contributions to formal ontology.Sébastien Richard, "Object and Something in General in Contemporary Formal Ontology", in Fosca Mariani Zini (ed.), The Meaning of Something, Springer, 2022. 133-149. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-09610-5_6. Roderick Chisholm refers to the role played by these meetings in contemporary philosophy.See L. E. Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of Roderick Chisholm (Library of Living Philosophers), Chicago and La Salle, IL, 1997, p. 17.

Career Smith has held academic posts at the University of Sheffield, the University of Manchester, the International Academy of Philosophy (Liechtenstein), and since 1994 at the University at Buffalo. In 2025 Smith established in collaboration with John Beverley an online Masters and PhD degree programs in Applied Ontology.Program hub: https://ontology.buffalo.edu His students in Buffalo have included: Berit Brogaard, Leo ZaibertHirsch Professor of Penal Theory and Ethics in the University of Cambridge, , Ryan Riccucci and John Beverley.

From 2002 to 2006, Smith served as Director of the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS), initially in Leipzig and then, from 2004, in Saarbrücken.

In 2005, Smith founded the National Center for Ontological Research (NCOR), under the auspices of which he initiated in 2006 the Ontology for the Intelligence Community, subsequently STIDS, conference series. In 2009 he founded the International Conference on Biomedical Ontology (ICBO).Barry Smith, ed., Proceedings of the First International Conference on Biomedical Ontology, Buffalo, New York, July 24–26, 2009. , last accessed August 25, 2017.

From 1992 to 2016, Smith served as editor of The Monist: An International Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry.

From 2016, he served as editor of international standard ISO/IEC 21838: Top Level Ontologies, Parts 1 and 2, which were published by ISO in 2021. Part 1 specifies the requirements for being a top-level (which means: domain-neutral) ontology. Part 2 is devoted to Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). In its issue of September 28, 2022 the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung refers to BFO as the first example of a piece of philosophy that has been accepted as an industrial norm, describing this as a 'small sensation in the history of science'.

In the course of his career, Smith has held visiting positions at universities in Austria, Finland, Malta, and the Netherlands; as well as in the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center; in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and also in the Ricerche di Dinamica dei Sistemi e di Bioingegneria (LADSEB), now the Laboratory for Applied Ontology, in Padua.Nicola Guarino, "BFO and DOLCE: So far, so close ..." (2017), Cosmos + Taxis, 4 (4):10-18 (2017), .

Since 2019, Smith has served as visiting professor in the University of Italian Switzerland.

Research activities

Historical background of work in ontology

From the beginning of his career, Smith worked in the field of ontology, his interest in this field having been prompted by the book Time and Modes of BeingTime and Modes of Being, translated by Helen R. Michejda, Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas, 1964. by the Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden. At first he focused on the history of ontology as a sub-discipline of philosophy, focusing especially on philosophers in the tradition of Brentano and Husserl, including not only Ingarden but also other pupils of Husserl such as Adolf Reinach and Johannes Daubert.Karl Schuhmann, Barry Smith, "Against Idealism: Johannes Daubert vs. Husserl's Ideas I", The Review of Metaphysics, 38 (4) (June 1985), 763-793Marco Tedeschini, From Phenomenology to Formal Ontology: How Barry Smith and Kevin Mulligan Made Husserl’s Descriptive Psychology into a Form of Realism, Archivio di filosofia, 83 (3), 2015, 177-188.Daniel R. Sobota, "The Question of Reality. A Postscript to Schuhmann and Smith on Daubert’s Response to Husserl’s Ideas I", in Rodney K. B. Parker (ed.), The Idealism-Realism Debate Among Edmund Husserl’s Early Followers and Critics, Cham: Springer Verlag. pp. 135-149 (2021) A special focus was on the theory of ontological dependence and part-whole relations proposed by Husserl,Fabrice Correia, "Ontological Dependence", Philosophy Compass 3/5 (2008): 1013–1032, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00170.xKit Fine, "Part-Whole", Cambridge Companion to Husserl, Cambridge University Press, 1995. a theory which was applied by Husserl's students for example to the understanding of the ontology of mental and linguistic acts.Kevin Mulligan, ed., Speech Act and Sachverhalt: Reinach and the Foundations of Realist Phenomenology, Reidel, 1987. In 1984 he co-authored the paper "Truth-Makers",Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons and Barry Smith, Truth-Makers, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 44 (1984), 287-321. which is said to have "introduced the truth-maker idea as a contribution to the correspondence theory of truth",D. M. Armstrong, Truth and Truthmakers, Cambridge University Press, 2004.Fraser MacBride, "Truthmakers", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2013).Philip Larrey, From Searle’s Speech Acts to Smith’s Truth-Makers, Raffaela Giovagnoli and Robert Lowe (eds.), The Logic of Social Practices, New York: Springer, 2020, 37-48. a still-active research program at the borderlines of logic, semantics and philosophical ontology that is based on a new understanding of the correspondence theory of truth.

Geospatial ontology

From the mid-1990s, Smith's work in ontology has exerted an impact on multiple domains outside philosophy,Thomas Pradeu, Maël Lemoine, Mahdi Khelfaoui, and Yves Gingras (2024). "Philosophy in science: Can philosophers of science permeate through science and produce scientific knowledge?." The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 75(2), 375-416. starting in 1995 in a collaboration with David Mark, one of the founders of geographic information science (GIS). In this connection Smith introduced the idea of fiat objectsBarry Smith, "Fiat Objects", Topoi, 20: 131–148, 2001. to describe (often rectangular) geospatial entities, such as postal districts and real estate parcels, which are not separated from their surroundings by any physical discontinuity.Kim Lowell, "Fiat boundaries: some implications for interpretation, decision-support, and multi-temporal analysis." Environmental and ecological statistics 15 (2008): 369-383. This idea has been adopted also in other fields.Richard Davies (ed.), Natural and Artifactual Objects in Contemporary Metaphysics. Exercises in Analytic Ontology, London: Bloomsbury, 2019.L. Vogt, P. Grobe, B. Quast, T. Bartolomaeus, "Fiat or Bona Fide Boundary — A Matter of Granular Perspective", PLoS ONE, 7(12): e48603.Faith Sternlieb, et al, A Question of Fit: Reflections on Boundaries, Organizations and Social–Ecological systems, Journal of Environmental Management, 130, 2013, 117-125.Evans, M. J., & Stoffle, R. W. (2026). "Where Does a Sacred Place End? Rethinking Boundaries in Heritage Stewardship", Land, 15(9), 1587.

Biomedical ontology

Since 2000, much of Smith's research has been centered on the application of ontology in biomedical informatics, where he has worked on a variety of projects relating to biomedical terminologies and electronic health records.Martin Berzell, Electronic Healthcare Ontologies: Philosophy, the Real World and IT Structures, Linköping Studies in Arts and Science, 2010, No. 517. He is a founding coordinating editor of the OBO Foundry,Barry Smith, et al., "The OBO Foundry: coordinated evolution of ontologies to support biomedical data integration", Nature Biotechnology 25, 1251-1255 (2007). and has served as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Gene Ontology (GO) Consortium and of the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI).Anita Bandrowski, et al., "The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations", PLOS One, April 29, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0154556 He contributes to the development of a number of biological and biomedical ontologies, including the Protein Ontology, the Plant Ontology,Ramona Lynn Walls, Laurel Cooper, Justin Lee Elser, Maria Alejandra Gandolfo, Christopher J Mungall, Barry Smith, Dennis William Stevenson, Pankaj Jaiswal, "The Plant Ontology facilitates comparisons of plant development stages across species", Frontiers in Plant Science, June 4, 2019, 10, 631. and others. Between 2005 and 2015 he was a co-PI of the NIH National Center for Biomedical Ontology, where he was responsible especially for dissemination of ontology best practices and for providing training opportunities for biomedical ontologists.Chelsea Wald, “More Than Words”, ‘’Science’’, 2011/02, Between 2013 and 2018 he served as ontology lead on the NIAID ImmPort project.

Social ontology

Smith works also on the ontology of social reality, particularly in connection with the work of John Searle.Bauwens M. "Institutions as dispositions: Searle, Smith and the metaphysics of blind chess". Journal of the Theory of Social Behavior 2018;1–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12161 He served as consultant to Hernando de Soto, director of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Peru, on projects relating to the advancement of property and business rights among the poor in developing countries.Smith, B. Searle and De Soto: The New Ontology of the Social World. In B. Smith, D. Mark & I. Ehrlich (eds.), The Mystery of Capital and the Construction of Social Reality. Chicago: Open Court. pp. 35-51 (2008) De Soto's work is based on the crucial role of documents—title deeds, stocks and shares, insurance policies—in ensuring the sorts of rights with which we are accustomed in developed economies. Drawing on De Soto's ideas Smith proposed a theory of document acts that would parallel the theory of speech acts developed by Reinach in 1913 and then by J. L. Austin and Searle in the 1960s.B. Smith, “How to Do Things with Documents”, Rivista di Estetica, 50 (2012), 179-198.B. Smith, “Document Acts”, in A. Konzelmann Ziv and H. B. Schmid (eds.), Institutions, Emotions, and Group Agents. Contributions to Social Ontology, Dordrecht: Springer, 2014, 19-31.

Intelligence, defense and security