DOLCE: A descriptive ontology for linguistic and cognitive engineering¹

Issue title: Foundational Ontologies in Action

Guest editors: Stefano Borgo, Antony Galton and Oliver Kutz

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Borgo, Stefano^{a; *} | Ferrario, Roberta^a | Gangemi, Aldo^{b; c} | Guarino, Nicola^a | Masolo, Claudio^a | Porello, Daniele^{a; d} | Sanfilippo, Emilio M.^a | Vieu, Laure^{a; e}

Affiliations: [a] Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy | [b] Dipartimento di Filologia Classica e Italianistica, FICLIT, University of Bologna, Italy | [c] Semantic Technology Laboratory, ISTC-CNR, Italy | [d] Dipartimento di Antichità, Filosofia, e Storia, DAFIST, University of Genova, Italy | [e] Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse, CNRS, Toulouse, France

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. E-mail: stefano.borgo@cnr.it.

Note: [1] This paper is a presentation of dolce based on (Masolo et al., 2003) and experience acquired with its application.

Note: [] Accepted by: Oliver Kutz

Abstract: dolce, the first top-level (foundational) ontology to be axiomatized, has remained stable for twenty years and today is broadly used in a variety of domains. dolce is inspired by cognitive and linguistic considerations and aims to model a commonsense view of reality, like the one human beings exploit in everyday life in areas as diverse as socio-technical systems, manufacturing, financial transactions and cultural heritage. dolce clearly lists the ontological choices it is based upon, relies on philosophical principles, is richly formalized, and is built according to well-established ontological methodologies, e.g. OntoClean. Because of these features, it has inspired most of the existing top-level ontologies and has been used to develop or improve standards and public domain resources (e.g. CIDOC CRM, DBpedia and WordNet). Being a foundational ontology, dolce is not directly concerned with domain knowledge. Its purpose is to provide the general categories and relations needed to give a coherent view of reality, to integrate domain knowledge, and to mediate across domains. In these 20 years dolce has shown that applied ontologies can be stable and that interoperability across reference and domain ontologies is a reality. This paper briefly introduces the ontology and shows how to use it on a few modeling cases.

Keywords: dolce, foundational ontology, ontological analysis, formal ontology, use cases

DOI: 10.3233/AO-210259

Journal: Applied Ontology, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 45-69, 2022