Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche

The “Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche” (CNR: National Research Council) is the technical body for basic and applied research of the Italian Ministry for Universities and Research. It is also in charge of the preparation of standards of national interest and manages special pluri-annual grants for projects on various focused topics, following the policy directions of the Council of Ministries. It is organized in about 100 autonomous institutes, employing about 5000 researchers, and addresses all the branches of sciences and humanities. The “Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione” (ISTC: Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology) is one of these institutes employing more than fifty full-time researchers. ISTC is involved in research activities in cognitive, communicative and linguistic processes; theory, analysis and technology of spoken language; artificial intelligence; social cognition; cognitive technologies, neural networks, and autonomous robotics.
The “Semantic Technology Laboratory (STLab)”, founded in 2008, performs basic and applied research on semantic technologies with an interdisciplinary approach: it combines Computer Science, Philosophy and Linguistics. On the application and development side, emphasis is given to the use of ontologies for information integration, information retrieval, semantic web services, business, industrial, legal, biomedical, and alimentary information systems, social simulation, and electronic commerce. Some resources are publicly available, including reusable components for ontology engineering and methodological specifications. http://www.istc.cnr.it