What with literal/physical (ontic) and modelling/linguistic (epistemic/semantic) ontologies having come to the fore recently, when I noticed a name I recognised in the long-running [ontolog-forum] I paused to check the intersection.
It was back in 2002/2004 I last mentioned Nicola Guarino – positively – in the epistemic modelling context. Early influence on my own journey.
I’ve been following the [ontolog-forum] email exploder for more than a decade as part of international efforts to standardise and harmonise the “Upper Ontology” of any number business, organisational and industrial information models. Before that several other such global standardisation efforts too. Ten years ago, my interests had already become a lot more “meta” than many of those seeking to standardise on specific details, so it was pretty frustrating to see the mix of the already great and good with the many interested newcomers even getting on the same page with what are, let’s face it, the most fundamental questions of existence. I have very rarely actually interacted, preferring to monitor the evolving topics of interest and the recycling of language to refer to these.
I noticed the name Nicola Guarino last month and continuing as a topic of forum posts even now, but hadn’t noticed Guarino had been the keynote speaker in the Jan 2025 Ontology Summit. It will be interesting to read what he had to say in 2025.
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