Basic Formal Ontology 2014-05-03 Release Notes

The 2014-05-03 release of the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is identical to the previous release (2012-11-15) except for some minor changes to metadata and the addition of a classes-only variant. See the BFO 2 release notes for further information about BFO 2:

http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/bfo/2012-07-20/ReleaseNotes


Known Issues

The focus of this release is the classes-only variant. A number of issues remain outstanding. Unresolved issues are listed on the BFO tracker:

https://code.google.com/p/bfo/issues/list


BFO Classes Variant

The http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/bfo/2014-05-03/classes-only.owl variant ("bfo_classes_only.owl") was generated by removing all OWL object properties from http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/bfo/2014-05-03/bfo.owl ("bfo.owl"). The bfo_classes_only.owl variant includes only the class hierarchy and annotations -- there are no object properties or logical axioms that use the object properties. As the logical axioms in the bfo_classes_only.owl variant are limited to subclass and disjoint assertions they are much weaker than the logical axioms in bfo.owl.
 
If you plan to use the relations that define BFO 2, you should import bfo.owl instead of bfo_classes_only.owl. To the extent that the relations are used without importing bfo.owl, be mindful that they should be used in a manner consistent with their use in bfo.owl. Otherwise if your ontology is imported by a another ontology that imports bfo.owl there may be inconsistencies.