This is a report on travels in Italy in the Fall of 2004. Sites visited included: the Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 04), 4 to 6 November, in Turin; Universita di Roma la Sapeinza, 7 to 9 November; and Istituto de Cibernetica del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Napoli, 10 to 12 November.
My keynote address at the Workshop on the Potential for Cognitive Semantics, held as part of the Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 04) on 3 November was entitled Formalization and Implementation for Cognitive Semantics, and on 4 November, I also presented Ontology, Society and Ontotheology at the main conference, and aksi debated Barry Smith on the philosophy of ontologies. Turino is a beautiful and interesting city, and I recommend it highly.
On 8 November, I presented Data, Schema, Ontology and Logic Integration to Maurizio Lenzerini's group at Universita di Roma la Sapeinza, and also had some very interesting discussions (and some fine food); Lenzerini and colleagues wish to try our SCIA system, and to use some of its ideas in their own systems. On 11 November, I gave the same talk at Istituto de Cibernetica del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, and on 12 November, gave Ontology, Society and Ontotheology, with some additional emphasis on consciousness; Ryoko Goguen sang to illustrate some of the points with music. We enjoyed Napoli very much!
Data, Schema, Ontology and Logic Integration is the current version of a paper originally titled Data, Schema, and Ontology Integration, prepared for the Workshop on Combinations of Logic (CombLog'04), 28-30 July 2004, in Lisbon. It introduces the integration stack, consisting of data, schema, ontology, and ontology language, each of which requires translation for some cases of integration; it also summarizes work on the SCIA matching tool, and on the mathematical theory behind the integration stack and the tool, including general definitions for schema and schema mapping that encompasses spreadsheets, relational, XML, etc., as well as ontologies of different kinds (OWL, RDF, KIF, etc.); see our data integration page for more detail.