Distinguished Lecture – Modeling business relationships
Nicola Guarino
National Research Council (CNR)
Abstract
Enterprise modeling requires, of course, to pay attention to different kinds of business relationships. In many cases, we really need to talk of such relationships, for instance where the contractual conditions that regulate them evolve in time, or when such conditions are violated. In terms of conceptual modeling, this means that relationships need to be reified, that is, they need to be put in the domain of discourse. In this talk, I will first introduce the ontological basis of relationships reification, according to which relationships are seen as truthmakers of relations. I will then discuss two actual case studies, concerning respectively the core relations used to model economic transactions in the REA ontology, and the relations within a complex service system.
Bio
Nicola Guarino, research director at the Italian National Research Council (CNR), works at the nation-wide Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC-CNR), leading the Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA) located in Trento. A graduate in electronic engineering at Padua university in 1978, since 1991 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 service science, socio-technical systems, and e-government. He is founder and former editor-in-chief (with Mark Musen of Stanford University) of Applied Ontology, founder and past president of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications, former general chair of the international conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS), editorial board member of Journal of Data Semantics, and editor of the IOS Press book series Frontiers in AI and Applications. He is also fellow of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI).
Host
José Borbinha
Local:
Alameda – Pavilhão de Informática III, piso 0, Anfiteatro FA3
Taguspark – Sala 2N1.5 (videoconferência)