I work at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, where I am the Director of the KRDB Research Centre for Knowledge and Data. Since 2023 I also serve as President of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA), of which I have been a founding member since 2009.

I received a PhD from the University of Liverpool in 2005 and hold the Italian National Habilitations for Full Professor in 01/B1 (Informatica) and 09/H1 (Sistemi di elaborazione delle informazioni). I also hold the habilitations for Associate Professor in 11/C2 (logica, storia, e filosofia della scienza) and in 01/A1 (logica matematica e matematiche complementari).

I was Program Chair of FOIS 2014 and of DL 2023, General Chair of JOWO 17, FOIS 18, EKAW 20 / EKAW 22, and ICCC 22. I was also the chief organiser and scientific chair of the 2020/21 Bolzano Summer of Knowledge, PI in the European Project COINVENT and co-project leader of the OntoIOp standardisation activity of OMG. I am also on the Editorial Board of the journal Applied Ontology and Associate Editor of CEUR.
Before joining the University of Bolzano, I worked at the University of Magdeburg, at the Transregional Collaborative Research Center "Spatial Cognition" in Bremen, at the Information Management Group at the University of Manchester, at the Logic and Computation Group at the University of Liverpool, and at the Intelligent Systems Department of the University of Leipzig.

I studied Architecture at the University of Dortmund, Mathematics & Philosophy at the University of Bochum, Cognitive & Computer Science at the University of Sussex, and Mathematics & Philosophy at Humboldt University of Berlin and Free University of Berlin.

In 2000, I obtained an M.Sc. degree from Humboldt University with a thesis on Quantified Modal Logic, supervised by Marcus Kracht and Ronald B. Jensen.

I was awarded a PhD in 2005 from the University of Liverpool for the thesis
"E-connections and Logics of Distance", supervised by Frank Wolter, and refereed by Wiebe van der Hoek and Melvin C. Fitting. I received a Distinguished Dissertations Award (Finalist) from the British Computer Society (BCS/CPHC) in the 2004/2005 competition.