Thomas Bittner is Director of the Qualitative Spatiotemporal Reasoning Unit (QSR) in the Ontology Research Group (ORG) and a Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo. He is a specialist in formal ontology and its applications in geospatial and biomedical informatics. His research interests include bioinformatics, formal ontology, qualitative spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal reasoning, approximate reasoning, representation and reasoning about vagueness and indeterminacy, medical information science, theoretical foundations of geographic information systems, spatial information science, and formal geography.

Relevant QSR publications listed below in the Bibliography: [1, 9-20]

 

Maureen Donnelly is a Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo who specializes in logic with applications to ontology-based reasoning in bioinformatics and other fields. Her research interests include formal ontology, qualitative spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal reasoning, approximate reasoning, representation, and reasoning about vagueness and indeterminacy, medical information science, theoretical foundations of geographic information systems, spatial information science, and formal geography.

Relevant QSR publications listed below in the Bibliography: [9-14, 19-24]

 

Louis J. Goldberg pursued a research career in the neuroscience of motor control at UCLA and received a MERIT Award from the NIH in recognition of this research. He served as Director of the M.S. and Ph.D. programs in Oral Biology at UCLA and as Dean of the University at Buffalo School of Dental Medicine. Since 2003, he has been active in the field of biomedical ontology working closely with Barry Smith and his colleagues on a number of projects ranging from critical analysis of the SNOMED Dental Vocabulary to ontology-supported radiological, and electrophysiological waveform image analysis.

Relevant QSR publications listed below in the Bibliography: [1, 25]

 

Barry Smith is an Associated Researcher in the QSR and Director of the Ontology, Logic and Technology Unit (OLT). Smith’s current research focus is ontology and its applications in biomedicine and biomedical informatics, where he is working on a variety of projects relating to biomedical terminologies and electronic health records.

Relevant QSR publications listed below in the Bibliography: [7-8, 14-15, 25-31]

 

1. Bittner, T. and L.J. Goldberg, "The Qualitative and Time-Dependent Character of Spatial Relations in Biomedical Ontologies," Bioinformatics, 2007. accessible at: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btm155.

2. Rosse, C., et al., "Motivation and Organizational Principles for Anatomical Knowledge Representation: The Digital Anatomist Symbolic Knowledge Base," Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 1998. 5: 17-40.

3. Brachman, R.J. and H.J. Levesque, eds. Readings in Knowledge Representation. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1985.

4. Weld, D.S. and J. de Kleer, eds. Readings in Qualitative Reasoning about Physical Systems. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1985.

5. Cohn, A.G. and S.M. Hazarika, "Qualitative Spatial Representation and Reasoning: An Overview," Fundamenta Informaticae, 2001. 46: 1-29.

6. Forbus, K., "Qualitative Process Theory," Artificial Intelligence, 1984. 24: 85-168.

7. Smith, B., "Ontology: An Introduction," in Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information, L. Floridi, ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003: 155-166.

8. Smith, B. and B. Brogaard, "Quantum Mereotopology," Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 2002. 35: 1-9.

9. Bittner, T. and M. Donnelly. "A Formal Theory of Qualitative Size and Distance Relations," in Proceedings of the 21 International Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning, QR2007. 2007: 31-49.

10. Bittner, T. and M. Donnelly, "Logical Properties of Foundational Relations in Bio-ontologies," Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 2007. 39: 197-216.

11. Donnelly, M. and T. Bittner. "Spatial Relations between Classes of Individuals in Spatial Information Theory," Cognitive and Computational Foundations of Geographic Information Science. International Conference (COSIT 2005). 2005: 22-35.

12. Donnelly, M., T. Bittner, and C. Rosse, "A Formal Theory for Spatial Representation and Reasoning in Bio-medical Ontologies," Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 2006. 36: 1-27.

13. Bittner, T., M. Donnelly, and S. Winter, "Ontology and Semantic Interoperability," in Large-scale 3D Data Integration: Problems and Challenges, D. Prosperi and S. Zlatanova, eds. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2005: 139-160.

14. Bittner, T., M. Donnelly, and B. Smith. "Individuals, Universals, Collections: On the Foundational Relations of Ontology," Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems, FOIS04. 2004: 160-171.

15. Bittner, T. and B. Smith, "A Theory of Granular Partitions," in Foundations of Geographic Information Science, M. Duckham, M. Goodchild, and M. Worboys, eds. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2003: 117-151.

16. Bittner, T. and S. Winter, "On Ontology in Image Analysis," in Integrated Spatial Databases, P. Agouris and A. Stefanidis, eds. 1999. Portland, ME: Springer-Verlag, 1999: 168-191.

17. Bittner, T., "Approximate Qualitative Temporal Reasoning," Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 2002. 35: 39-80.

18. Bittner, T., "Approximate Temporal Reasoning," Spatial and Temporal Granularity, Papers from the 2000 AAAI Workshop. 2000: 12-30.

19. Bittner, T. and M. Donnelly, "A Theory of Granular Parthood Based on Qualitative Cardinality and Size Measures," Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems. 2006: 45-71.

20. Bittner, T. and M. Donnelly, "A Temporal Mereology for Distinguishing Objects and Portions of Stuff," Twenty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-07). 2007: 22-34.

21. Donnelly, M., "Containment Relations in Anatomical Ontologies," AIMA Annual Symposium Proceedings. 2005: 206-210.

22. Donnelly, M., "On Parts and Holes: The Spatial Structure of the Human Body," in Proceedings of the 11th World Congress on Medical Informatics (MedInfo-04). 2004: 204-211.

23. Donnelly, M., "Relative Places," in Applied Ontology. 2005: 42-49.

24. Donnelly, M., "Layered Mereotopology," in IJCAI 2003 -- Eighteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 2003: 23-31.

25. Grenon, P., B. Smith, and L. Goldberg, "Biodynamic Ontology: Applying BFO in the Biomedical Domain," Ontologies in Medicine: Proceedings of the Workshop on Medical Ontologies. 2004: 30-42.

26. Smith, B., "The Logic of Biological Classification and the Foundations of Biomedical Ontology," 10th International Conference in Logic Methodology and Philosophy of Science. 2004, 190-201.

27. Ceusters, W. and B. Smith, "Tracking Referents in Electronic Health Records," in Medical Informatics Europe. 2005, 22-33.

28. Johansson, I., et al., "Functional Anatomy: A Taxonomic Proposal," Acta Biotheoretica, 2005. 53: 153-166.

29. Smith, B., et al., "Anatomical Information Science," Spatial Information Theory. Proceedings of COSIT 2005. 2005: 1-14.

30. Cohn, A., "Formalising Bio-Spatial Knowledge," Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS'01). 2001: 23-35.

31. Smith, B., et al., "Relations in Biomedical Ontologies," Genome Biology, 2005. 6: r46.