Stefano Borgo studied math at the University of Padova (Bachelor), logic at Indiana University (Master) and knowledge representation at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (PhD).
Since 2019 he is head of the Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA). His research develops in the areas of information and social systems where logic, artificial intelligence and cognitive science overlap. He likes to start with an ontological approach to clarify the domain and to identify the problem. You can see this, for example, in his work on engineering function and product modeling and, for a different domain, on space representation. In general, he likes to work with people with different backgrounds because he is attracted to interdisciplinary topics.
He has given tens of invited talks at conferences and universities. Typically, people ask him to talk about applied ontology and how it can be used in some domain or context. He has been active in about 30 national and international projects. As most people, he didn't like all of them, but they often spark some interesting ideas and problems to think about. Today he is member of the Editorial Board of the journal Applied Ontology, the Semantic Web Journal, the Advisory Board of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA), the Industry and Standards Technical Committee of IAOA, and the steering committees of JOWO, Womocoe, Shapes and FOUST.
Applied ontology and its use in product and production modeling
Applied ontology (AO) has been introduced to overcome interoperability problems across information systems and today is used in domains as different as finance, medicine, geography, engineering and digital heritage. AO is intrinsically multidisciplinary and it deserves to be introduced twice: we first introduce AO as a way of thinking and, then, as a tool for modeling.
The second part of the talk is about the use of ontology in industrial activities. These activities are rich data producers and usually a company exploits several information systems targeting different tasks and users. The talk presents some (good and not so good) applications of ontology in manufacturing and discusses challenges like the modeling of product functionality and of resources in production planning.
