Nicola Guarino

KR Conference 2008 Conference Paper

Formalising Temporal Constraints on Part-Whole Relations

• Alessandro Artale
• Nicola Guarino
• C. Maria Keet

Representing part-whole relations and effectively using them in domain ontologies and conceptual data models poses multiple challenges. In this paper we face the issue of imposing temporal constraints on part-whole relationships, introducing a way to account for "essential" and "immutable" parts (and wholes) in addition to the usual "mandatory" parts (and wholes). Our approach is based on i) an explicit temporalization of the part-whole relation, which allows us to introduce a novel notion of "status" for part-whole relationships; ii) an explicit account of the ontological nature of the classes involved in a part-whole relationships, which distinguishes between "rigid" and "anti-rigid" classes. The main novelty in this paper is to resort to a temporal logic approach to capture the above mentioned notions. The formalization proposed here is grounded on the temporal description logic DLRUS and is based on previous successful efforts to formalize temporal conceptual models.

KR Conference 2004 Conference Paper

Social roles and their descriptions

• Emanuele Bottazzi
• Carola Catenacci
• Roberta Ferrario
• Aldo Gangemi
• Nicola Guarino
• Claudio Masolo
• Laure Vieu

This paper offers two main contributions. On the one hand, it establishes a general formal framework for developing a foundational ontology of socially constructed entities, in the broadest sense of this notion; on the other hand, it further contributes to understanding the ontological nature of roles. The key choice here is to put all social entities in the domain of discourse: besides social individuals, we also consider “reified” social concepts and roles, as well as their descriptions, i. e, the ’social conventions’ or 'contexts’ that define them. This allows us to formally characterize in a first-order theory the relationships among all these entities.

ECAI Conference 2000 Conference Paper

Identity, Unity, and Individuality: Towards a Formal Toolkit for Ontological Analysis

• Nicola Guarino
• Christopher A. Welty

AAAI Conference 1994 Conference Paper

Formalizing Ontological Commitments

• Nicola Guarino

Formalizing the ontological commitment of a logical language means offering a way to specify the intended meaning of its vocabulary by constraining the set of its models, giving explicit information about the intended nature of the modelling primitives and their a priori relationships. We present here a formal definition of ontological commitment which aims to capture the very basic ontological assumptions about the intended domain, related to issues such as identity and internal structure. To tackle such issues, a modal framework endowed with mereo-topological primitives has been adopted. The paper is mostly based on a revisitation of philosophical (and linguistic) literature in the perspective of knowledge representation. IL

ECAI Conference 1988 Conference Paper

DRL: Terminologic and Relational Knowledge in Prolog

• Nicola Guarino