Umberto Straccia

Umberto Straccia holds a PhD in Computer Science, obtained at the University of Dortmund in 1999. Currently, he is researcher at ISTI - CNR, Istituto di Scienze e di Tecnologie dell'Informazione (ISTI) del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR). His research activity is in the area of the Semantic Web, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning and Distributed Information Retrieval based on ontologies (defined in RDFS, OWL and RIF). Specifically, he has interest for the various hybrid languages that are the logical counterpart of Semantic Web languages, such as RDFS, Description Logics, Logic Programming, Fuzzy Logic and the variants obtained by any combination of them, with a major focus on the combination of Description Logics, Logic Programming, Answer Set Programming and Fuzzy Logic. On these topics, Umberto Straccia is author of more than  100 international publications (a book is in preparation) and has held various tutorials and invited talks. He is in the editorial board of various journals, program committee member of major conferences and teaches a course on the above mentioned topics at a master degree course in computer science at the University of Pisa, Italy. He is also author of several software artefacts, among which the fuzzyDL and SoftFacts reasoners for fuzzy description logics.