Ontolog Forum
Nicola Guarino
Nicola Guarino is a 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. He has been playing a leading role in the ontology field, developing a strongly interdisciplinary approach that combines together Computer Science, Philosophy, and Linguistics. Among the most well known results of his lab, the OntoClean methodology and the DOLCE foundational ontology. He has been founder and co-editor-in-chief of the Applied Ontology journal, founder and former president of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA). He is also an ER fellow and a fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI). Recently he received the Peter P. Chen award for outstanding contributions to the field of conceptual modeling.
On the theoretical side, his current research interests are focusing on the ontological foundations of knowledge representation and conceptual modeling and specifically the ontology of events, processes, and relationships, while on the application side he has been focusing on enterprise modeling, ontology of economics, and manufacturing. He is also interested in leveraging ontological analysis and semantic technologies to improve cognitive transparency, social accountability, and participatory governance of artificial intelligence artifacts.
His publications got 32,000+ citations, with H-index=56 according to Google Scholar
He has given many invited talks at the Ontology Summit as well as chairing summits, including:
- Making basic ontological choices: the DOLCE experience
- General Co-Chair of Ontology Summit 2011: Making the Case for Ontology
- General Co-Chair of Ontology Summit 2012: Ontology for Big Systems
- Ontology Summit 2025 Keynote Address: Ontologies as specifications of conceptualizations: correctness, precision, and accuracy
- Ontological Analysis as a Search for Truthmakers
