Basic Formal Ontology

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.

[8] 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.

In 2021, the standard ISO/IEC 21838-2:2021 Information Technology — Top-level Ontologies (TLO) — Part 2: Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) was published by the Joint Technical Committee of the International Standards Organization and the International Electrotechnical Commission.