Biography

Nicola Guarino is research director at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council (ISTC-CNR), where he leads the Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA) in Trento. Since 1991 he has been playing a leading role in the ontology field, developing a strongly interdisciplinary approach that combines together Computer Science, Philosophy, and Linguistics. His impact 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 his lab, the OntoClean methodology and the DOLCE foundational ontology. Current research interests include conceptual modeling, enterprise integration, service science, socio-technical systems, and e-government. He is founder and editor-in-chief (with Mark Musen) of the Applied Ontology journal, founder and past president of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications, and editorial board member of Int. Journal of Semantic Web and Information Systems and Journal of Data Semantics. He has been recently nominated fellow of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI).

Abstract

In integrated manufacturing, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems aim at handling the whole spectrum of information processed during all phases of product development, from conceptual and detailed design, to process planning, cost analysis, marketing, and possibly recycling. In this scenario, product information interoperability plays of course a key role, and several standards have been introduced for this purpose to let different computer systems communicate. We are still far away, however, from semantic interoperability, whose ultimate purpose is to facilitate mutual agreement among people on the relevant business terms, especially in large multinational contexts where designers, technicians, marketing persons and administrators speak different languages and are scattered across the world. Yet the costs of human misunderstandings in these contexts may be huge, especially for critical applications. The technique being used nowadays to address these problems is based on computational ontologies. In this talk I will briefly explain what computational ontologies are, what is the role they can play in integrated manufacturing, and what is the status of research in this promising field.