Role: Principal, from Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, living in Italy
Website: http://www.inf.unibz.it/~franconi/
Task Areas
My research interests are in Description Logics, Knowledge Representation, Foundations of Databases, Ontologies and Conceptual Modelling, Temporal Logics and Temporal Databases, Multi-dimensional Data Models, Information Access and Integration, Peer-to-Peer Database Systems, Computational Logics, Natural Language Semantics. Currently, my main research focus is on the application of KR technologies to databases, from both the foundational and the application point of view.
My interest on ontologies and rules dates back to a period when the semantic web was still a non existing buzzword 
I've been recently active in the DAWG for the formalisation of the semantics of SPARQL.
My main goal in this WG is to offer my experience in the formalisation of the semantics of languages, and their computational characterisation. I'd like to see a rule language with a well understood and non ambiguous semantics for the whole framework, fully interoperating with the W3C semantic web standards (RDF(S) and OWL) and with DB technologies, with effective and scalable computational properties, amenable to optimsations.
Biography
Before joining the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano as an Associate Professor, Enrico Franconi spent four years as a tenured Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester, Department of Computer Science, in the Information Management Group. He graduated in Physics in 1987 from the University of Rome "La Sapienza". From 1989 to 1998 he had a permanent position as Senior Researcher at IRST, Trento, Italy (Institute for the Scientific and Technologic Research, a public research institute), leading the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning group.
Prof. Franconi is currently involved as Principal Investigator of the European 5th Framework RTD project "SEmantic Webs and AgentS in Integrated Economies" (SeWAsIE); of the European 6th Framework Network of Excellence "Realizing the Semantic Web" (Knowledgeweb); of the European 6th Framework Network of Excellence "Interoperability Research for Networked Enterprises Applications and Software" (Interop); and he is co-investigator of the European 6th Framework FET (basic research) project `Thinking Ontologies" (Tones). Prof. Franconi is also corresponding member of the 6th Framework Network of Excellence "Reasoning on the Web with Rules and Semantics" (Rewerse); he is member of the Advisory Committee of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and of the European 5th Framework Network of Excellence on "Computational Logic" (CoLogNET). Prof. Franconi has been Principal Investigator in various past projects on the foundations of information systems, logics and ontologies: British Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) project "Flexible source integration in distributed knowledge-based query processing for bioinformatics information sources" (TAMBIS-II - co-investigator); EPSRC project "Knowledge Representation meets Databases" (KRDB); European ESPRIT-4 Long Term Research project "Foundations of Data Warehouse Quality" (DWQ); Italian National Research Council (CNR) projects "Ontological tools for the Management and the Integration of Heterogeneous Knowledge", "Ontological and Linguistic Tools for Conceptual Modelling", and "Hybrid Knowledge Representation Systems"; Italian Space Agency (ASI) project "Integration and Access to Heterogeneous Databases". Recently prof. Franconi chaired the 1998 International Description Logics Workshop (DL-98); the 6th International Workshop on Knowledge Representation meets Databases (KRDB-99); the PC of the 12th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI-00); the International Workshop on Foundations of Models for Information Integration (FMII-2001); the 9th International Symposium on Temporal Representation and Reasoning (TIME-2002); the 9th International Workshop on Knowledge Representation meets Databases (KRDB-02); the 2003 International Description Logics Workshop (DL-03); the 2004 Dagstuhl Seminar on Logic Based Information Agents; the 13th Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems (SEBD-2005). He is in the editorial board of the Journal of Applied Logic (JAL), published by Elsevier. He has been invited to give keynote talks at various conferences on Conceptual Modelling, Information Integration, and Knowledge Engineering; he will be invited speaker at the 25th ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS-2006). Prof. Enrico Franconi is named in the top half list of the 10,000 most cited researchers in computer science (handled by CiteSeer). His main research interest is in providing formal theories and efficient principled systems for expressing and reasoning with structured knowledge, with an emphasis for their use for conceptual modelling tasks in domains with high semantic complexity. His current research involvement includes Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in Artificial Intelligence and Information Systems -- and in particular Description Logics, Mathematical and Computational Logics, Formal Methods, Conceptual Modelling, Intelligent Access to Information, Formal Ontology, Natural Language Semantics.
Contact
Email: <franconi@inf.unibz.it>
Telephone: +39 0471 016 120
Physical Address: Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Faculty of Computer Science, I-39100 Bozen-Bolzano BZ, Italy
