Michael Gruninger
University of Toronto
Michael Gruninger is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. He has worked in the area of applied ontology with an emphasis on the use of formal techniques for ontology design and verification. Several of his projects have been adopted as international standards, including the Process Specification Language (ISO 18629), Common Logic (ISO 24707), and the Upper Ontology (ISO 21838-4). Michael is a past-President of the International Association of Applied Ontology (IAOA) and past Editor-in-Chief of the Applied Ontology journal.
The COLORE Hypothesis
The specification of ontologies for commonsense concepts and relationships has been a longstanding goal of conceptual modelling and knowledge representation. In both of these cases, however, the design of ontologies has been slow and very labour-intensive, and the verification of ontologies (determining whether the proposed axioms are correct with respect to the intended semantics of the concepts) remains a key challenge. Extending Bourbaki's original notion of structures meres (mother structures}, the COLORE Hypothesis posits that all first-order theories currently used in applied ontology and conceptual modelling are equivalent to combinations of the mathematical theories in the Common Logic Ontology Repository (COLORE). Ontology design and verification are thereby reduced to the problem of finding the set of mathematical theories that are the best match to the intended semantics of concepts. In this talk we will explore applications of this approach to autoformalization, ontology learning, and the identification of ontological bias in machine learning datasets.