Showing papers by "Nicola Guarino published in 2008"

Formalising temporal constraints on part-whole relations

Abstract: 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.

Knowledge-Oriented Technologies for the Integration of Networked Enterprises

Abstract: TOCAI.IT is an on-going Italian 3-year project, funded by the Ministry of Universities and Scientific Research under the FIRB program for the basic research, aimed at developing an integrated group of methodologies, techniques and software systems based on the most advanced knowledge technologies for the on-the-field analysis, specification, implementation and evaluation of new enterprise organization models in the “internetworked enterprise” perspective. This paper describes the goals and activities of the project and its progress after 1 year from the start.