Lecture

In the years to come, we will experience an increasing demand for
building Reference Conceptual Models in critical domains (e.g., healthcare,
cybersecurity, bioinformatics, finance, space), as well as employing them to
address classes of problems for which sophisticated conceptual distinctions
are demanded. One of these key problems is Semantic Interoperability. Semantic
Interoperability is a ubiquitous problem as all the relevant questions we
need to answer, in science, government and organizations, demand putting
together data that exist in autonomously developed data silos. Effective
semantic interoperability requires an alignment between worldviews or,
to put it more accurately, it requires the precise understanding of
the relation between the (inevitable) ontological commitments assumed by
different representations of reality and the systems based on them (including
sociotechnical systems). In this talk, I elaborate on several tools required
for building reference conceptual models that are trustworthy as support
for semantic interoperability. These tools are of a variety of guises and
together provide a foundation for the discipline of ontology-driven conceptual
modelling. These include: theoretical tools (e.g., ontological and cognitive
theories), ontology-based modelling languages, methodological tools (e.g.,
catalogues of patterns and anti-patterns) and computational tools (e.g.,
computational support for model construction, verification, validation,
code generation, complexity management, as well as constraint learning and
model auto-repair).