Profile

Prof. Giancarlo Guizzardi is a Full Professor of Software Science and Evolution and Chair of the Department of Semantics, Cybersecurity & Services (SCS) at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. He is one of the world's foremost authorities on formal and applied ontology, with nearly three decades of contributions spanning conceptual modeling, ontology-driven information systems, and enterprise semantics.

His interdisciplinary approach integrates philosophy, logic, linguistics, and cognitive science to address foundational challenges in knowledge representation and systems engineering. Prof. Guizzardi is the principal architect of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) and the OntoUML modeling language, both widely adopted in industry and academia.

He is collaborating with Modelware on encoding gUFO, the lightweight OWL version of UFO, as an OML vocabulary. The goal is to let domain ontologies authored in OML extend gUFO's upper-level categories and inherit the rich analytical patterns it provides, bringing formal ontological rigor directly into the OML Code platform.

Focus Areas

• Formal and applied ontology
• Conceptual modeling and OntoUML
• Ontology-driven information systems engineering
• Enterprise semantics and knowledge graphs