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Ontolog Forum

Session Foundations and Tools
Duration 1 hour
Date/Time 15 Apr 2026 16:00 GMT
9:00am PDT/12:00pm EDT
5:00pm BST/6:00pm CST
Convener Ken Baclawski

Ontology Summit 2026 Foundations and Tools

  • Nicola Guarino Ontological Analysis as a Search for Truthmakers
    • Slides
    • Video Recording
    • YouTube Video
    • A crucial choice when designing an ontology concerns, of course, what to include in the domain of discourse. The entities that are relevant for our conceptualization of reality—those we implicitly assume to exist—are typically far more numerous than those we explicitly choose to talk about. So, our cognitive domain is much broader than our domain of discourse. For example, when we say that John and Mary are married, our language only refers to them, although we know that there has been a wedding event and that an ongoing marriage relationship exists. It is up to us to introduce these additional entities in our domain of discourse, should we need to represent and reason about them. In this talk I will argue that formal ontology gives us a clear criterion for this decision: include in the domain the truthmakers of the relevant propositions we aim to represent. In this talk I will introduce different kinds of truthmakers, depending on the types of properties and relationships involved, and I will show how various truthmaking patterns can enhance the explanatory value of an ontology.
    • 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

Conference Call Information

Discussion

  • 12:52:54 Gary Berg-Cross : You need to unpack the domain concepts to get truthmakers into the conversation and models.
  • 13:08:34 Phil Jackson : what John is describing seems to correspond the level of descriptions in natural language, and to be different from a "meta-ontology", i.e. an ontology of ontologies. Perhaps a meta-ontology could be a useful intermediate between NL and individual ontologies.

Resources

Previous Meetings

 Session
ConferenceCall 2026 04 08Foundations and Tools
ConferenceCall 2026 04 01Foundations and Tools
ConferenceCall 2026 03 25Ontologies and AI
... further results

Next Meetings

 Session
ConferenceCall 2026 04 22Synthesis
ConferenceCall 2026 04 29Interoperability
ConferenceCall 2026 05 06Interoperability
... further results
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