My research interests are in the fields of knowledge representation and reasoning, description and modal logics, ontologies, conceptual modelling, and digital humanities. In the recent years my work focused on the theoretical and methodological aspects behind the creation of ontology-based data management solutions, which includes the design and development of formal domain ontologies, mapping assertions specification and formal characterisation, data integration and data access, efficient ontology-based query answering, formal semantics of conceptual modelling languages, temporal and spatial knowledge representation, SPARQL querying support systems, data exploration techniques for non-technical users.
My research experience has been always characterised by a strong degree of interdisciplinarity, and I like to build linguistic and conceptual bridges between different disciplines. This attitude gave me the opportunity to directly work with domain knowledge corpora by chemical engineers, Roman Empire historians, policy makers, mechanical artefact designers, research and innovation public agencies, among others. The idea of using the principles and technologies of knowledge representation to allow the cross-domain interchange of meanings is surely one of the most relevant driving engines of my research activity.
