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), and editorial board member of International Journal of Semantic Web and Information Systems and Journal of Data Semantics. He is also ER fellow and 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 on ontological analysis and semantic technologies to improve the cognitive transparency, the social accountability and the participatory governance of artificial intelligence artifacts. His publications have 30,000+ citations, with H-index=54 according to Google Scholar.

See also: Dr. Guarino's invited talk to the Ontolog community at the session page: ConferenceCall_2006_02_02