The accidental discovery on the shelves of the Bodleian Library of the book Time and Modes of Being[2] by Roman Ingarden, a Polish student of Edmund Husserl, initiated his interest in the possibilities of an ontological approach to philosophy that would span the boundaries of the analytic and phenomenological traditions.

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).

[4] In 1979 they together founded the Seminar for Austro-German Philosophy,[5] which organized workshops and conferences centered around the work of early Central European philosophers from Bolzano to Tarski and their impact on subsequent generations.

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

In September 2022 the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung pointed to the fact that BFO is the first example of a piece of philosophy that has been elevated to the status of an industrial norm, describing this as a 'small sensation in the history of science'.

[17] In the course of his career Smith has held visiting positions in the universities of Erlangen, Graz, Irvine CA, Turku, Innsbruck, Hamburg, Konstanz, Malta, Leiden, TU Vienna, and Koblenz; as well as in the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center; in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris; and in the Ricerche di Dinamica dei Sistemi e di Bioingegneria (LADSEB), now the Laboratory for Applied Ontology[18], in Padua.

In the 1990s Smith worked closely with David Mark, one of the founders of geographic information science (GIS), on initiatives in the field of geospatial ontology.

In this connection he introduced the idea of fiat objects[30] 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.

[44] He serves 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.

[45] 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.

In 2008–2010 he served as technical lead on a project sponsored by the US Army Net-Centric Data Strategy Center of Excellence (ANCDS CoE) to create the Universal Core Semantic Layer (UCore-SL).

[58] Artificial Intelligence and Complex Systems In 2022 Smith published with the German scientist Jobst Landgrebe Why Machines Will Never Rule the World.