Impegno ontologico irregimentato per le ontologie computazionali

Abstract

Il presente lavoro si prefigge: di illustrare le nozioni di impegno ontologico e regimentazione; di esporre criticamente tre strategie tratte dalle applicazioni della nozione di impegno ontologico in campo logico, filosofico e della rappresentazione della conoscenza e del ragionamento per l'intelligenza artificiale; di applicare la nozione di regimentazione a una teoria logica impiegata nel campo della rappresentazione della conoscenza e del ragionamento per l'intelligenza artificiale.

My bachelor’s thesis tackles the theoretical foundations of knowledge representation for AI and focuses on a novel methodological approach to ontology engineering. According to Nicola Guarino, ontologies are vocabularies specified by an ontological commitment. To define what kind of software are ontologies and to explore their scopes and tools, we first need a clear notion of what an ontological commitment is. This notion requires philosophical soundness and, at the same time, must be implementable for scientific and commercial purposes. Ontologies are meant to create a virtual environment where different experts from different fields can communicate and share their data in the most intuitive and effective way. To represent their domain of knowledge we cannot ignore how they communicate and share data on a daily basis. I argue that we do not need to formalize the ontological commitments of one or more theories, as Guarino and others claim. It would be more useful to regiment them. In conclusion, in my thesis I try to answer the following research-questions: what is the ontological commitment of a theory; why software engineers need to explicit the ontological commitments of their ontologies; how they can do make them explicit in a way that’s useful for domain experts that will employ the ontology.