Professor
Department of Biomedical Informatics
Artificial Intelligence; Biomedical Informatics; Biomedical Ontology; Pain
Barry Smith is a prominent contributor to both theoretical and applied research in ontology, contributing especially in the biomedical domain. He is the author of some 500 publications on ontology, with some 48,000 citations and an h-index of 103. His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the US, Swiss and Austrian National Science Foundations, the US Department of Defense, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the European Union. In 2002 he received the 2 million Euro Wolfgang Paul Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and in 2010 he was awarded the first Paolo Bozzi Prize in Ontology by the University of Turin.
Smith is SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy in the University at Buffalo (UB) and Affiliate Professor in the UB Departments of Biomedical Informatics and Computer Science and Engineering. He is also Director of the National Center for Ontological Research and national Co-Director of the Clinical and Translational Science Ontology Group (CTSOG). He has served as ontology lead for the NIAID ImmPort project, as lead for dissemination and ontology best practices for the National Center for Biomedical Ontology, as a Scientific Advisor to the Gene Ontology Consortium, and as a PI on the Protein Ontology and Infectious Disease Ontology projects.
Smith’s pioneering work on the science of ontology led to the formation in 2004 of the OBO (Open Biomedical Ontologies) Foundry, a suite of ontology resources designed to support information-driven research in biology and biomedicine. Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), the capstone ontology in the OBO Foundry suite, was approved in 2021 as international standard ISO/ICE 21838-2. It is now used by some 500 ontology development groups around the world.