I am retired research associate at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the
Italian National Research Council (ISTC-CNR), and former director of the ISTC-CNR Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA) based in Trento. Since 1991 I have been playing a leading role in the ontology field, developing a strongly interdisciplinary approach that combines together Computer Science, Philosophy, and Linguistics. The impact of such approach is testified by a long list of widely cited papers and many keynote talks and tutorials in major conferences involving different communities. Among the most well known results of my lab, the OntoClean methodology and the DOLCE foundational ontology. I have been founder and editor-in-chief (with Mark Musen, Stanford University) of the Applied Ontology journal, founder and former president of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA), and editorial board member of Int. Journal of Semantic Web and Information Systems and Journal of Data Semantics. I am also founding member of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence and fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI).
On the theoretical side, my current research interests are focusing on the ontological foundations of knowlege representation and conceptual modeling and specifically the ontology of events and relationships (collaborating with Giancarlo Guizzardi to the new version of the UFO ontology), while on the application side my research is focusing on enterprise modeling and the ontology of economics. I am also interested in leveraging on ontological analysis and semantic technologies to improve the cognitive transparency, the social accountability and the participatory governance of artificial intelligence artifacts.
