Review of Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology .

The book is primarily a how-to book: if you are an adherent, practitioner, advocate, or would-be user, of the BFO, then this book is to help you building your own ontology or ontologies using BFO. The book is very well written and clear. In its opening chapters, it urges sensible default philosophical positions such as fallibilism and realism, and it educates, and cautions, on logical and philosophical mistakes over representing data and information, mistakes that are commonly made by folk not trained in logic or philosophy. It has extensive suggestions throughout on further reading. As the book explains in its Introduction, the wider problem that BFO takes on is that of combining the diversity of information, in the same or similar scientific domains, with the use of computers for storing, retrieving, and reasoning with that information. In the absence of prophylactics like BFO, there is the grim prospect of information siloes where there is scientific information in different stores, and the stores cannot talk to each other, and, possibly, outsiders cannot interrogate any of them. The solution that BFO proposes is that of the use of “ontologies,” and these are intended to provide a semantics for the subject domains and thus to go beyond, for example, controlled vocabularies. An