At this year’s C-FOR Oslo tutorial, I had the opportunity to guide participants through the foundational principles of Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), with an emphasis on concrete modeling exercises tied to real-world datasets. The tutorial was designed for professionals and researchers seeking to deepen their technical mastery of ontological modeling using BFO as a semantic backbone.
We began by reviewing the fundamental structure of BFO, distinguishing between continuants and occurrents, and exploring key upper-level categories like independent continuant, specifically dependent continuant, process, and quality. I emphasized that good ontological modeling must track not just the static entities in a domain but also their evolution and realization across time—a theme that recurred in all four case-based exercises.
The hands-on portion of the tutorial consisted of four exercises, each paired with worked-out solutions that participants could study in parallel. You can find my slides for the tutorial, background reading, exercises, and solutions on the National Center for Ontological Research (NCOR) Academy github page.
Many thanks to Salvatore Florio, Guendalina Righetti, and Øystein Linnebo for being gracious hosts.
What follow is brief discussion the the solutions provided.
Case 1: Jet Specification
We modeled an aircraft (Airbus A320 Neo) using a design pattern grounded in BFO axioms. The task was to represent how technical specifications—like engine model and dimensions—are linked via roles and qualities to a material artifact and its manufacturer. Participants learned how to use is about
, has continuant part
, and rdf:type only
to capture class-level constraints.
Case 2: Aircraft Performance Measurement
This scenario modeled a deviation between expected and observed approach speeds of an Airbus A321-111. We illustrated how to construct a BFO-conformant pattern that ties together design specification, test process, and measurement data, using temporal parts and process aggregation. The exercise culminated in a SPARQL query designed to compute the average measured approach speed over several trials.
Case 3: SOC Role Definitions
Here, we modeled the U.S. Standard Occupational Classification roles for aerospace engineers, capturing how job descriptions such as “Adaptability Evaluation” and “Equipment Testing” relate to outputs and realizable entities like reports and aircraft specs. This showed how to handle granular roles in applied ontology work.
Case 4: Employment Data Modeling
The final case involved linking employment statistics to SOC role definitions using publicly available wage data. Participants mapped employment totals as qualities inhering in object aggregates, which were in turn outputs of measurement processes, all conforming to BFO’s realist ontology commitments.