If by BFO you are referring to "Basic Formal Ontologies", then yes, I'm referring to that "crowd". My thoughts on ontologies in general are that they can certa

If by BFO you are referring to "Basic Formal Ontologies", then yes, I'm referring to that "crowd". My thoughts on ontologies in general are that they can certainly be powerful, and I've seen them used in the past in rules engines that powered fraud detection applications. In the SemWeb community, in the late 2000s, they successfully convinced a bunch of CIOs of massive organizations, especially in the US Federal Government, that a key to being able to centralize and federate all of their data, and save money on duplicative systems, they could simply have semantic mappings on top of every IT system's databases, and query this semantic layer. Ideally, they could eliminate duplicated data, so that all systems would get data from the "Authoritative Data Source" system instead of duplicating it locally in the application's database. I'm sure you can immediately see why this is wildly stupid and unrealistic. Imagine what it would look like if every single piece of data that I can technically obtain from another source has to remain in that source, and that storing that data locally with my application specific data is forbidden..... Suddenly, there is a massive increase in I/O, drop in performance, etc. The whole project taught me a lesson about the politics of academia, and how there is a segment of the population that is highly educated, and has learned how to manufacture work for themselves outside of academia by pushing for high-level government officials to implement programs based on their theories..... MITRE was a big part of this particular project.