Pattern-Based Ontology Engineering

                                                      Giancarlo Guizzardi

                                      Ontology and Conceptual Modeling Group (NEMO),
                                   Federal University of Espirito Santo (UFES), Vitória, Brazil
                                                                 &
                                                 Laboratory of Applied Ontology,
                                     Institute for Cognitive Science and Technology (ISTC),
                                     Italian National Research Council (CNR), Trento, Italy



                         Abstract. In his ACM Turing Award Lecture entitled “The Humble Program-
                         mer”, E. W. Dijkstra discusses the sheer complexity one has to deal with when
                         programming large computer systems. His article represented an open call for
                         an acknowledgement of the complexity at hand and for the need of more so-
                         phisticated techniques to master this complexity. Dijkstra’s advice is timely and
                         even more insightful in our current scenario, in which semantic interoperability
                         becomes a pervasive force driving and constraining the process of creating in-
                         formation systems in increasingly complex combinations of domains.
                             More and more, information systems are created either by combining exist-
                         ing autonomously developed subsystem, or are created to eventually serve as
                         components in multiple larger yet-to-be-conceived systems. In this scenario, in-
                         formation systems engineering, in particular, and rational governance, in gen-
                         eral, cannot succeed without the support of a particular type of discipline. A
                         discipline devoted to establish well-founded theories, principles, as well as
                         methodological and computational tools for supporting us in the tasks of under-
                         standing, elaborating and precisely representing the nature of conceptualizations
                         of reality, as well as in tasks of negotiating and safely establishing the correct
                         relations between different conceptualizations of reality. The discipline to ad-
                         dress the aforementioned challenges is the discipline of Ontology Engineering.
                             In this talk, I would like to address a particular set of complexity manage-
                         ment tools for the engineering of ontologies that can properly serve as reference
                         conceptual models for interoperability. This set includes: Ontological Patterns,
                         as methodological mechanisms for encoding basic ontological micro-theories;
                         (ii) Ontology Pattern Languages, as systems of representation that take onto-
                         logical patterns as higher-granularity modeling primitives, (iii) Ontological An-
                         ti-Patterns as structures that can be used to systematically identify recurrent
                         possible deviations between the set of valid state of affairs admitted by a model
                         and the set of state of affairs actually intended by the stakeholders.

                            Short Bio. Giancarlo Guizzardi holds a PhD (with the highest distinction) in
                         Computer Science from the University of Twente, in The Netherlands. He is
                         one of the leaders of the Ontology and Conceptual Modeling Group (NEMO) in
                         Brazil. He is also an Associate Researcher at the Laboratory of Applied Ontolo-
                         gy (ISTC-CNR), Trento, Italy. Between 2013 and 2015, he was a Visiting Pro-
                         fessor at the University of Trento, Italy. He has been doing research in ontology




Proceeding of SAOA 2015 Copyright © 2015 held by the author(s)                                                VIII
                         and conceptual modeling for the past 19 years and has published circa 176 pub-
                         lications in these areas (including 9 award-wining publications). Among the
                         best-known results of his lab, we have the foundational ontology UFO and the
                         conceptual modeling language OntoUML. Over the years, he has contributed to
                         the ontology and conceptual modeling communities in roles such as keynote
                         speaker (e.g., ER), general chair (e.g., FOIS), tutorialist (e.g., CAISE, ER),
                         Program Board Member (e.g., CAISE, ER) and PC Chair (e.g., FOIS, EDOC).
                         Moreover, he is an associate editor of the Applied Ontology journal and has
                         been a member of editorial boards of international journals such as Require-
                         ments Engineering and Semantic Web. Furthermore, between 2012 and 2014,
                         he was an elected member of the Executive Council of the International Associ-
                         ation of Ontologies and its Applications (IAOA) and currently is a member of
                         its Advisory Board (since 2014). Finally, he has been involved in technology
                         transfer projects in sectors such as Telecommunications, Software Engineering,
                         Digital Advertisement, Product Recommendation, Digital Journalism, Complex
                         Media Management and Energy.




Proceeding of SAOA 2015 Copyright © 2015 held by the author(s)                                            IX