The award, the most valuable ever in the academic history of Germany,
is believed to be the largest single prize ever awarded to a philosopher.
Of the 70 candidates nominated by German academic institutions, 14 top-ranking
international scholars and scientists have been selected to share the
more than $23 million that has been set aside by the German government
for the Wolfgang Paul program. Of these, Smith will receive the largest
single amount.
The bulk of the award will fund Smith's ongoing series of pioneering
studies designed to show that philosophical methods and theories can be
applied to information science.
The award will be presented to him and to the other recipients by Edelgard
Bulmahn, Germany's federal minister for education and research, at a ceremony
on Tuesday in Berlin.
In addition to the monetary award, Smith and the rest of this year's
winners—eight of whom are from the U.S.—will have the opportunity
to conduct research for three years under first-rate conditions at a German
academic institution. In Smith's case, the host institution will be the
University of Leipzig, where an interdisciplinary team of researchers
will work under his guidance. They will collaborate with researchers at
UB in a newly founded Buffalo-Leipzig Institute for Formal Ontology and
Medical Information Science.
Smith will continue to teach at UB, but will take a leave of absence
during the 2003-04 academic year to work in Leipzig. He will spend his
vacations there as well.
Smith's research project in Leipzig serves to establish the future-oriented
field of "formal ontology in information systems." It involves the university's
departments of Philosophy, Medicine and Information Science, as well as
the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience.
The project addresses a major problem confronting information science
today, which is that it must employ a large number of modeling methods
and conceptual categories that lack a unifying foundation. As a result,
databases and terminological standards show a very low degree of compatibility
and cannot be re-used, even for similar areas of application.
The goal of Smith's research is to develop a powerful general ontology,
i.e., a semantically sound taxonomical and lexical framework, for overcoming
such problems in reusability and coherence. The main test bed for this
general ontology will be the development of standards for clinical trials.
Smith will in this connection collaborate with a team in the University
of Leipzig led by Barbara Heller that is working on cross-linguistic medical
standardization projects sponsored by the European Union.
Smith recently helped establish at UB a master's program in ontology
and information science that trains ontologists that are needed by private
industry, government, non-profit organizations and other institutions
to develop and manage large databases and directories. They model and
analyze complex structures and processes, and build systems for data and
enterprise integration in a variety of fields.
The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation is a non-profit foundation established
in 1953 by the Federal Republic of Germany for the promotion of international
research cooperation. It enables highly qualified scholars to spend extended
periods of research in Germany and promotes ensuing academic contacts.
Smith studied at Oxford University and received his doctorate from the
University of Manchester, England. He has worked at the University of
Sheffield, the University of Manchester and the International Academy
of Philosophy in Liechtenstein. He joined that UB philosophy faculty in
1993, and also is affiliated with the National Center for Geographic Information
and Analysis, and the Cognitive Science Center.
