Daniele Porello

• PhD
• Associate Professor at University of Genoa

Among the possible solutions to the paradoxes of collective preferences, single-peakedness is significant because it has been associated to a suggestive conceptual interpretation: a single-peaked preference profile entails that, although individuals may disagree on which option is the best, they conceptualize the choice along a shared unique dimens...

Axiom weakening is a novel technique that allows for fine-grained repair of inconsistent ontologies. In a multi-agent setting, integrating ontologies corresponding to multiple agents may lead to inconsistencies. Such inconsistencies can be resolved after the integrated ontology has been built, or their generation can be prevented during ontology ge...

The Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) was developed over the last two decades by consistently putting together theories from areas such as formal ontology in philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophical logics. It comprises a number of micro-theories addressing fundamental conceptual modeling notions, including entity types and r...

dolce, the first top-level (foundational) ontology to be axiomatized, has remained stable for twenty years and today is broadly used in a variety of domains. dolce is inspired by cognitive and linguistic considerations and aims to model a commonsense view of reality, like the one human beings exploit in everyday life in areas as diverse as socio-te...

This articles explores the mereological foundation of truthmaker semantics. Building upon Kit Fine’s abstract theory of part in Fine [J Philos 107(11):559–589, 2010], we engage in an exploration of the mereological assumptions that determine the construction of truthmaker semantics. Our approach yields semantics for a diverse range of logics, inclu...

The modelling of concepts, besides involving disciplines like philosophy of mind and psychology, is a fundamental and lively research problem in several artificial intelligence (AI) areas, such as knowledge representation, machine learning, and natural language processing. In this scenario, the most prominent proposed solutions adopt different (oft...

In many application domains, it is common to talk not only about the entities populating that domain, but also about statements (aka claims) that are expressed about those very entities. This is particularly the case in the Humanities, e.g., when scholars express their critical statements about paintings, literary texts, musical works, etc. The ont...

Prototype theories are an important family of cognitive theories of concepts that model the classification under a concept in terms of the proximity of an object to the prototype of the concept. While logic-based definitions of concepts are standard in Description Logics and OWL, prototype-based definitions are not directly available, although they...

We present an ontological framework for the reason-based model of individual preferences introduced by F. Dietrich and C. List. According to this perspective, an agent prefers x to y if and only if the importance of the reasons motivating x outweighs the importance of the reasons motivating y. Firstly, we represent motivating reasons as concepts in...

DOLCE, the first top-level (foundational) ontology to be axiomatized, has remained stable for twenty years and today is broadly used in a variety of domains. DOLCE is inspired by cognitive and linguistic considerations and aims to model a commonsense view of reality, like the one human beings exploit in everyday life in areas as diverse as socio-te...

The Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) has been used to provide foundations for the major conceptual modeling constructs. So far, UFO has reflected a view in which domain entities are fundamentally divided into those that collect invariants of the domain (i.e., types) and those entities that manifest those invariants (i.e., instances), following t...

Weighted Threshold Operators are n-ary operators that compute a weighted sum of their arguments and verify whether it reaches a certain threshold. They have been extensively studied in the area of circuit complexity theory, as well as in the neural network community under the name of perceptrons. In Knowledge Representation, they have been introduc...

Concept refinement operators have been introduced to describe and compute generalisations and specialisations of concepts, with, amongst others, applications in concept learning and ontology repair through axiom weakening. We here provide a probabilistic proof of almost-certain termination for iterated refinements, thus for an axiom weakening proce...

When considering two concepts in terms of extensional logic, their combination will often be trivial, returning an empty extension. Consider e.g. “a Fish Vehicle”, i.e., “a Vehicle which is also a Fish”. Still, people use sophisticated strategies to produce new, non-empty concepts. All these strategies involve the human ability to mend the conflict...

When people combine concepts these are often characterised as “hybrid”, “impossible”, or “humorous”. However, when simply considering them in terms of extensional logic, the novel concepts understood as a conjunctive concept will often lack meaning having an empty extension (consider “a tooth that is a chair”, “a pet flower”, etc.). Still, people u...

The theory of collective agency and intentionality is a flourishing field of research, and our understanding of these phenomena has arguably increased greatly in recent years. Extant theories, however, are still ill-equipped to explain certain aspects of collective intentionality. In this article we draw attention to two such underappreciated (and...

Types are fundamental for conceptual modeling and knowledge representation, being an essential construct in all major modeling languages in these fields. Despite that, from an ontological and cognitive point of view, there has been a lack of theoretical support for precisely defining a consensual view on types. As a consequence, there has been a la...

Game theory is largely about interactions of agents whose decisions affect each other. The combination of agents’ actions corresponds to outcomes, which may impact agents’ goals, either positively or negatively. The analysis of the probable consequences and expected utilities of all possible outcomes is fundamental to support agents when deciding w...

In this paper, we provide a semantic foundation for trust-related concepts in the light of trust management. We extend our previous work, the Reference Ontology of Trust, to clarify and provide a deeper account of some building blocks of trust, such as beliefs and intentions of a trustor, pieces of evidence that indicate that a trustee is trustwort...

A thorough understanding of what needs are is fundamental for designing well-behaved information systems for many social applications and in particular for public services. Talking about needs pervades indeed the jargon of Public Administrations when motivating their service offering. In this paper, we propose an ontological analysis of needs, aimi...

In recent years, there has been a growing interest, within the financial sector, in the adoption of ontology-based conceptual models to make the nature of conceptualizations explicit, as well as to safely establish the correct relations between them, thereby supporting semantic interoperability. Despite the wide number of efforts to create a unifie...

Trust is widely acknowledged as the cornerstone of relationships in social life. But what makes an agent trust a person, a resource or an organization? Which characteristics should a trustee have in order to be considered trustworthy? The importance of understanding trust in organizations has motivated us to investigate the representation of trust...

Forests, cars and orchestras are very different ontological entities, and yet very similar in some aspects. The relationships they have with the elements they are composed of is often assumed to be reducible to standard ontological relations, like parthood and constitution, but how this could be done is still debated. This paper sheds light on the...

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the development of well-founded conceptual models for Service Management, Accounting Information Systems and Financial Reporting. Economic exchanges are a central notion in these areas and they occupy a prominent position in frameworks such as the Resource-Event Action (REA) ISO Standard, se...

We discuss the role of perceptron (or threshold) connectives in the context of Description Logic, and in particular their possible use as a bridge between statistical learning of models from data and logical reasoning over knowledge bases. We prove that such connectives can be added to the language of most forms of Description Logic without increas...

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the development of ontologically well-founded conceptual models for Information Systems in areas such as Service Management, Accounting Information Systems and Financial Reporting. Economic exchanges are central phenomena in these areas. For this reason, they occupy a prominent position in m...

Money is so ever-present in modern life that we usually take its existence for granted. Financial crisis like the recent one in 2008 are significant alerts about the importance of money and finance. Having a clear understanding of the concepts on the finance domain is fundamental to figure out the evolution of the economy before innovations in the...

We propose a logic to reason about data collected by a number of measurement systems. The semantic of this logic is grounded on the epistemic theory of measurement that gives a central role to measurement devices and calibration. In this perspective, the lack of evidences (in the available data) for the truth or falsehood of a proposition requires...

Trust is a key component of relationships in social life. It is commonly argued that trust is the “glue” that holds families, societies, organizations and companies together. In the literature trust is frequently considered as a strategic asset for organizations. Having a clear understanding of the notion of trust and its components is paramount to...

For over a decade now, a community of researchers has contributed to the ontological foundations of Conceptual Modeling by participating to the development of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) and the UFO-based modeling language OntoUML, which have been successfully employed in a number of different sectors. The empirical feedback from these...

For over a decade now, a community of researchers has contributed to the ontological foundations of Conceptual Modeling by participating to the development of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) and the UFO-based modeling language OntoUML, which have been successfully employed in a number of different sectors. The empirical feedback from these...

Informally speaking, a truthmaker is something in reality in virtue of which sentences of a language can be made true. This fundamental philosophical notion plays a central role in applied ontology. In particular, a recent non-orthodox formulation of this notion proposed by the philosopher Josh Parsons, which we labeled weak truthmaking, has been s...

In this paper we analyse the ontological nature of capability agreements and discuss the relation between capability delegation, vulnerabilities and risk.

Preference relations are intensively studied in Economics, but they are also approached in AI, Knowledge Representation, and Conceptual Modelling, as they provide a key concept in a variety of domains of application. In this paper, we propose an ontological foundation of preference relations to formalise their essential aspects across domains. Firs...

Preference relations are intensively studied in Economics, but they are also approached in AI, Knowledge Representation, and Conceptual Modelling, as they provide a key concept in a variety of domains of application. In this paper, we propose an ontological foundation of preference relations to formalise their essential aspects across domains. Firs...

For over a decade now, a community of researchers has contributed to the development of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) - aimed at providing foundations for all major conceptual modeling con- structs. This ontology has led to the development of an Ontology-Driven Conceptual Modeling language dubbed OntoUML, reflecting the ontological micro-...

A concept is traditionally defined via the necessary and sufficient conditions that clearly determine its extension. By contrast, cognitive views of concepts intend to account for empirical data that show that categorisation under a concept presents typicality effects and a certain degree of indeterminacy. We propose a formal language to compactly...

How can organisations survive not only the substitution of members, but also other dramatic changes, like that of the norms regulating their activities, the goals they plan to achieve, or the system of roles that compose them? This paper is as first step towards a well-founded ontological analysis of the persistence of organisations through changes...

It is widely recognized that accurately identifying and classifying competitors is a challenge for many companies and entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, it is a paramount activity which provide valuable insights that affect a wide range of strategic decisions. One of the main challenges in competitor identification lies in the complex nature of the compet...

We present a number of modal logics to reason about group norms. As a preliminary step, we discuss the ontological status of the group to which the norms are applied, by adapting the classification made by Christian List of collective attitudes into aggregated, common, and corporate attitudes. Accordingly, we shall introduce modality to capture agg...

The debate on collective/group/shared agency and intentionality within the philosophy of action is long-running and multifaceted. A central concern has been the relation between collective and individual intention/agency, and whether the former is in any sense reducible to the latter. In this paper, we add another facet to this discussion, by consi...

A concept is traditionally defined via the necessary and sufficient conditions that clearly determine its extension. By contrast, cognitive views of concepts intend to account for empirical data that show that categorisation under a concept presents typicality effects and a certain degree of indeterminacy. We propose a formal language to compactly...

It is widely recognized that accurately identifying and classifying competitors is a challenge for many companies and entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, it is a paramount activity which provide valuable insights that affect a wide range of strategic decisions. One of the main challenges in competitor identification lies in the complex nature of the compet...

How can organisations survive not only the substitution of members, but also other dramatic changes, like that of the norms regulating their activities, the goals they plan to achieve, or the system of roles that compose them? This paper is as first step towards a well-founded ontological analysis of the persistence of organisations through changes...

We discuss steps towards a formalisation of the principles of an agentive naïve proto-physics, designed to match a level of abstraction that reflects the pre-linguistic conceptualisations and elementary notions of agency, as they develop during early human cognitive development. To this end, we present an agentive extension of the multi-dimensional...

Capturing and understanding crowd dynamics is an important issue under diverse perspectives. From social, psychological, and political sciences to safety management, studying, modeling, and predicting the presence, behavior, and dynamics of crowds, possibly preventing dangerous activities, is absolutely crucial. In the literature, crowds have been...

We introduce a number of logics to reason about collective propositional attitudes that are defined by means of the majority rule. It is well known that majoritarian aggregation is subject to irrationality, as the results in social choice theory and judgment aggregation show. The proposed logics for modelling collective attitudes are based on a sub...

This work contributes to the theory of judgment aggregation by discussing a number of significant non-classical logics. After adapting the standard framework of judgment aggregation to cope with non-classical logics, we discuss in particular results for the case of Intuitionistic Logic, the Lambek calculus, Linear Logic and Relevant Logics. The mot...

We introduce a number of logics to reason about collective propositional attitudes that are defined by means of the majority rule. It is well known that majoritarian aggregation is subject to irrationality, as the results in social choice theory and judgment aggregation show. The proposed logics for modelling collective attitudes are based on a sub...

Ontology engineering is a hard and error-prone task, in which small changes may lead to errors, or even produce an inconsistent ontology. As ontologies grow in size, the need for automated methods for repairing inconsistencies while preserving as much of the original knowledge as possible increases. Most previous approaches to this task are based o...

Ontology engineering is a hard and error-prone task, in which small changes may lead to errors, or even produce an inconsistent ontology. As ontologies grow in size, the need for automated methods for repairing inconsistencies while preserving as much of the original knowledge as possible increases. Most previous approaches to this task are based o...

Types are a crucial concept in conceptual modelling, logic, and knowledge representation as they are an ubiquitous device to understand and formalise the classification of objects. We propose a logical treatment of types based on a cognitively inspired modelling that accounts for the amount of information that is actually available to a certain age...

Ontologies represent principled, formalised descriptions of agents' conceptualisations of a domain. For a community of agents, these descriptions may differ among agents. We propose an aggregative view of the integration of ontologies based on Judgement Aggregation (JA). Agents may vote on statements of the ontologies, and we aim at constructing a...

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1936/

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2050/

We address the problem of analysing the joint coherence of a number of concepts with respect to a background ontology. To address this problem, we explore the applicability of Paul Thagard's computational theory of coherence, in combination with semantic similarity between concepts based on a generalisation operator. In particular, given the input...

This work contributes to the theory of judgment aggregation by discussing a number of significant non-classical logics. After adapting the standard framework of judgment aggregation to cope with non-classical logics, we discuss in particular results for the case of Intuitionistic Logic, the Lambek calculus, Linear Logic and Relevant Logics. The mot...

In this paper, we present a succinct formalisation of the main categories of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) by summarising and simplifying a fragment of the version of [Gui05]. In this version, we show that the use first-order modal logic with no higher-order constructs suffices for many modelling tasks. We focus here on the case of univer...

We propose a formal framework to examine the relationship between (scientific) models and empirical observations. To make our analysis precise, models are reduced to first-order theories that represent both terminological knowledge—e.g., the laws that are supposed to regulate the domain under analysis and that allow for explanations, predictions, a...

We argue that a cognitive semantics has to take into account the possibly partial information that a cognitive agent has of the world. After discussing Gärdenfors's view of objects in conceptual spaces, we offer a number of viable treatments of partiality of information and we formalize them by means of alternative predicative logics. Our analysis...

Product structures are represented in engineering models by depicting and linking components, features and assemblies. Their understanding requires knowledge of both design and manufacturing practices, and yet further contextual reasoning is needed to read them correctly. Since these representations are essential to the engineering activities, the...

The aim of this paper is to propose a methodology for evaluating the quality of collective decisions in sociotechnical systems (STS). We propose using a foundational ontology for conceptualizing the complex hierarchy of information involved in decisions in STS (e.g., normative, conceptual, factual, perceptual). Moreover, we introduce the concept of...

We propose and discuss a formal semantics for predicative languages in terms of cognitively meaningful structures, that is, in terms of the framework of conceptual spaces introduced by Gärdenfors. The motivation of this paper is twofold: on the one hand, we associate predicative languages, a fundamental tool in logic and knowledge representation, t...

We argue that a cognitive semantics has to take into account the possibly partial information that a cognitive agent has of the world. After discussing Gärdenfors's view of objects in conceptual spaces, we offer a number of viable treatments of partiality of information and we formalize them by means of alternative predicative logics. Our analysis...

Product structures are represented in engineering models by depicting and linking components, features and assemblies. Their understanding requires knowledge of both design and manufacturing practices, and yet further contextual reasoning is needed to read them correctly. Since these representations are essential to the engineering activities, the...

Cognitive semantics has been proposed by Gärdenfors (2000) as an alternative to truth-conditional semantics that models the relationship between language and mental representations of cognitive agents. Similar motivations emerged in philosophical logic, since a number of non-classical logics have been interpreted as modelling the reasoning capabili...

In knowledge representation, socio-technical systems can be modeled as multiagent systems in which the local knowledge of each individual agent can be seen as a context. In this paper we propose formal ontologies as a means to describe the assumptions driving the construction of contexts as local theories and to enable interoperability among them....

We introduce the notions of syntactic synonymy and referential synonymy due to Moschovakis. Those notions are capable of accounting for fine-grained aspects of the meaning of linguistic expressions, by formalizing the Fregean distinction between sense and denotation. We integrate Moschovakis’s theory with the theory of concepts developed in the fou...

In this paper, we introduce a logic to reason about group actions for groups that are defined by means of the majority rule. It is well known that majoritarian aggregation is subject to irrationality, as the results in social choice theory and judgment aggregation show. The logic of action that we use here for modelling group actions is based on a...

Relevant logics provide an alternative to classical implication that is capable of accounting for the relationship between the antecedent and the consequence of a valid implication. Relevant implication is usually explained in terms of information required to assess a proposition. By doing so, relevant implication introduces a number of cognitively...

We present a preliminary high-level formal theory, grounded on knowledge representation techniques and foundational ontologies, for the uniform and integrated representation of the different kinds of (qualitative and quantitative) knowledge involved in the designing process. We discuss the conceptual nature of engineering design by individuating an...

In this paper, we propose an integrated system that interfaces computer vision algorithms for the recognition of simple objects with an ontology that handles the recognition of complex objects by means of reasoning. We develop our theory within a foundational ontol-ogy and we present a formalization of the process of conferring meaning to images.

This note presents modal versions of resource-conscious logics. We concentrate on extensions of variants of Linear Logic with one minimal non-normal modality. In earlier work, where we investigated agency in multi-agent systems, we have shown that the results scale up to logics with multiple non-minimal modalities. Here, we start with the language...

This paper is a contribution to the development of an ontology of conflict. In particular, we single out and we study a peculiar notion of group conflict, that we suggestively label 'social contradiction'. In order to do so, we shall introduce and discuss the methodology of social choice theory, since it allows for defining the notion of collective...

In this paper, we discuss the approach based on Social Choice Theory and Judgment Aggregation to the definition of collective reasoning. We shall make explicit the aggregative nature of the notion of collective reasoning that is defined in the Judgment Aggregation account and we shall stress that the notion of logical coherence plays a fundamental...

We present an ontological analysis of the notion of group agency devel-oped by Christian List and Philip Pettit. We focus on this notion as it allows us to neatly distinguish groups, organizations, corporations – to which we may ascribe agency – from mere aggregates of individuals. We develop a module for group agency within a foundational ontology...

Socio-technical systems constitute a challenge for multiagent systems as they are complex scenarios in which human and artificial agents share information, interact and make decisions. For example, the design of an airport requires to interface information coming from automatic apparatuses as security cameras, conceptual information coming from age...

We analyse the computational complexity of three problems in judgment aggregation: (1) computing a collective judgment from a profile of individual judgments (the winner determination problem); (2) deciding whether a given agent can influence the outcome of a judgment aggregation procedure in her favour by reporting insincere judgments (the strateg...

We study a fragment of Intuitionistic Linear Logic com-bined with non-normal modal operators. Focusing on the minimal modal logic, we provide a Gentzen-style sequent calculus as well as a semantics in terms of Kripke resource models. We show that the proof theory is sound and complete with respect to the class of mini-mal Kripke resource models. We...

We show that logic has more to offer to ontologists than standard first order and modal operators. We first describe some operators of linear logic which we believe are particularly suitable for ontological modeling, and suggest how to interpret them within an ontological framework. After showing how they can coexist with those of classical logic,...

The aim of this abstract is to introduce a formal framework enabling to reason about resource-sensitive uses of artifacts. To achieve this, we integrate (non-normal) modalities into Intuitionistic Linear Logic. The function of an artifact is a (resource-sensitive) linear implication and we interpret each modality as an agent's bringing about of res...

We ask whether social interaction demands sharing social concepts. We illustrate our point by depicting possible situations that emerge when two individuals play chess. We formalize our hypothesis in First Order Logic and we show that the very idea of sharing social concepts poses an interesting challenge both from the standpoint of knowledge repre...

We show that logic has more to offer to ontologists than standard first order and modal operators. We first describe some operators of linear logic which we believe are particularly suitable for ontological modeling, and suggest how to interpret them within an ontological framework. After showing how they can coexist with those of classical logic,...

We study a fragment of Intuitionistic Linear Logic combined with non-normal modal operators. Focusing on the minimal modal logic, we provide a Gentzen-style sequent calculus as well as a semantics in terms of Kripke resource models. We show that the proof theory is sound and complete with respect to the class of minimal Kripke resource models. We a...

The impossibility results in judgement aggregation show a clash between fair aggregation procedures and rational collective outcomes. In this paper, we are interested in analysing the notion of rational outcome by proposing a proof-theoretical understanding of collective rationality. In particular, we use the analysis of proofs and inferences provi...

In this paper, we discuss a number of elements for developing an ontological model for representing decision making of human agents. In particular, our aim is to connect the results in cognitive science that show how emotions affect decisions with agent systems and knowledge representation. We focus in particular on the case of regret.

Several branches of computer vision heavily rely (but we could even say depend) on the availability of large datasets of labelled images. While such labeling is usually done by hand, a powerful help can be obtained from Internet and its related tools. In this paper we address the problem of automatically generating a set of images representing an o...

It has been claimed that deliberation is capable of overcoming social choice theory impossibility results, because it can justify the restriction of individual preferences to single-peaked profiles. Our aim is to better understand the relationship between single-peakedness and collective justifications of preferences.

Public deliberation has been defended as a rational and noncoercive way to overcome paradoxical results from democratic voting, by promoting consensus on the available alternatives on the political agenda. Some critics have argued that full consensus is too demanding and inimical to pluralism and have pointed out that single-peakedness, a much less...

The problem of merging several ontologies has important applications in the Semantic Web, medical ontology engineering and other domains where information from several distinct sources needs to be integrated in a coherent manner. We propose to view ontology merging as a problem of social choice, i.e. as a problem of aggregating the input of a set o...

In this paper, I discuss the analysis of logic in the pragmatic approach recently proposed by Brandom. I consider different consequence relations, formalized by classical, intuitionistic and linear logic, and I will argue that the formal theory developed by Brandom, even if provides powerful foundational insights on the relationship between logic a...

We propose an analysis of the impossibility results in judgement aggregation by means of a proof-theoretical approach to collective rationality. In particular, we use linear logic in order to analyse the group inconsistencies and to show possible ways to circumvent them.

This paper lists a number research topics at the interface of welfare economics, social choice theory, logic, and artificial intelligence. We will discuss in particular the role of logic in modelling the relationship between individual reasoning and group or social reasoning.

The problem of merging several ontologies has important applications in the Semantic Web, medical ontology engineering, and other domains where information from several distinct sources needs to be integrated in a coherent manner. We propose to treat ontology merging as a problem of social choice, i.e., as a problem of aggregating the input of a s...