Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) Ontology

References

(Wikipedia, 2016) ⇒ http://wikipedia.org/wiki/upper_ontology#DOLCE Retrieved:2016-3-18.
- Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) is the first module of the WonderWeb foundational ontologies library, ^[1] developed by Nicola Guarino and his associates at the Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA). As implied by its acronym, DOLCE has a clear cognitive bias, in that it aims at capturing the ontological categories underlying natural language and human common sense. DOLCE, however, does not commit to a strictly referentialist metaphysics related to the intrinsic nature of the world. Rather, the categories it introduces are thought of as cognitive artifacts, which are ultimately depending on human perception, cultural imprints and social conventions. In this sense, they intend to be just descriptive (vs prescriptive) notions, that assist in making already formed conceptualizations explicit.

(Gangemi et al., 2002) ⇒ Aldo Gangemi, Nicola Guarino, Claudio Masolo, Alessandro Oltramari, and Luc Schneider. “Sweetening Ontologies with DOLCE.” In: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 2002).
- CITED BY: ~464 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=15243924326220568563
- ABSTRACT: In this paper we introduce the DOLCE upper level ontology, the first module of a Foundational Ontologies Library being developed within the WonderWeb project. DOLCE is presented here in an intuitive way; the reader should refer to the project deliverable for a detailed axiomatization. A comparison with WordNet's top-level taxonomy of nouns is also provided, which shows how DOLCE, used in addition to the OntoClean methodology, helps isolating and understanding some major WordNet’s semantic limitations. We suggest that such analysis could hopefully lead to an “ontologically sweetened” WordNet, meant to be conceptually more rigorous, cognitively transparent, and efficiently exploitable in several applications.

http://www.loa-cnr.it/DOLCE.html
- DOLCE : a Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering
  - DOLCE is the first module of the WonderWeb Foundational Ontologies Library (WFOL). In our presentation paper (download pdf), it is described using first-order logic. The specific assumptions adopted for this module are first introduced informally, along with the basic categories, functions, and relations. We then present a rich axiomatic characterization, aimed at clarifying our assumptions and illustrate their formal consequences (theorems).