Giancarlo Guizzardi: Ontology, Semantics, and Explainable AI – Episode 51

Giancarlo Guizzardi

For nearly three decades, Giancarlo Guizzardi has researched and advanced the field of semantics and the practice of ontology and conceptual modeling.

His work on the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO), the OntoUML pattern language, and AI explainability are just a few of the accomplishments that make him an exemplar of the "full-stack ontologist."

We talked about:

his broad-ranging ontology and other responsibilities work at the University of Twente in the Netherlands

the origins of the term ontology in computer science in 1967

George Mealy's assertion that "every data makes an ontological commitment"

his take on the idea of capital O Ontology, both the conceptual tooling to build ontologies as digital artifacts and the design patterns that guide their creation

how his insight that conceptual modeling is the foundation of any system led to his development of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO)

his goal with UFO to give engineers tooling to reuse ontology patterns without having to expose them to the complexity of the underlying ontology itself

the resulting OntoUML pattern language

his belief that ontology engineering should separate conceptual modeling from design and implementation