The Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) was founded in April 2002 utilizing a grant of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. It comprehends an interdisciplinary research group with members from Philosophy, Computer and Information Science, Logic, Medicine, and Medical Informatics. IFOMIS established itself as a center of theoretically grounded research in both formal and applied ontology. It develops a formal ontology that has successfully been applied and tested in the domain of medical and biomedical information science, more specifically in relationship with SNOMED-CT, the Foundational Model of Anatomy, the Gene Ontology, the Open Biomedical Ontologies endeavour, and others.

Based on this success, IFOMIS initiated the creation of the European Centre for Ontological Research (ECOR) which was also established in the Saarland University. Through ECOR, IFOMIS has collaboration agreements with several other instutions (some of them being participants in this proposal as well), including the of Institute of Philosophy and Institute for Law and Computer Sciences of the Saarland University, DFKI Gmbh, the Laboratory for Ontology (University of Turin), the Bremen Ontology Group (University of Bremen), the Foundational Ontology Group (University of Leeds), the Laboratory for Applied Ontology (CNR, Italy), the Centre for Ontology of Geneva, the Human-Computer Studies Lab (University of Amsterdam), and the Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR.

IFOMIS is led by Prof. Barry Smith.
Contact person for RIDE within IFOMIS is CLOAKING .