Key Speaker

Nicola Guarino

National Research Council.
LADSEB-CNR.
web site: www.ladseb.pd.cnr.it/infor/ontology/ontology.html



• Biography
           Nicola Guarino (1954) is a senior research scientist at the Institute for Systems Theory and Biomedical Engineering of the Italian National Research Council (LADSEB-CNR), Padova. He graduated in Electrical Engineering at the University of Padova in 1978. In 1979­1984 he was responsible of the data acquisition and monitoring system of a large nuclear fusion experiment. He then joined LADSEB to work on knowledge representation issues. He is active in the ontology field since 1991, and has played a leading role in the AI community in promoting the study of the ontological foundations of knowledge engineering and conceptual modelling under an interdisciplinary approach. His current research activities regard ontology design, knowledge sharing and integration, ontology-driven information retrieval, and ontology-based metadata standardisation. He is general chairman of the International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 98, FOIS2001), and associated editor of the Semantic Web area of the Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence and of the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. He has published about 60 papers on scientific journals, books and conferences, and has been guest editor of 3 special issues on scientific journals related to formal ontology and information systems. He is a member of AAAI, ACM, and AI*IA.
• Content of the Talk
  "Ontological Analysis of Taxonomic Relationships"
           Taxonomies based on a partial-ordering relation commonly known as is-a or class inclusion play an important role in conceptual modeling. The intuitive simplicity of taxonomic relations has led however to widespread misuse, making clear the need for rigorous analysis techniques. I will argue that a clean, well-founded taxonomic structure has significant implications for understanding, reusing, and integrating different conceptual models. I will present a methodology for ontological analysis that imposes formal constraints on taxonomic relationships, based on the philosophical notions of identity, unity, and essence. I will demonstrate the effectiveness of this methodology by taking real examples of poorly structured taxonomies and revealing cases of invalid generalization.