Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering

Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) is an upper ontology, and the first module of the WonderWeb foundational ontologies library, 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.
DOLCE is an ontology of particulars, in the sense that its domain of discourse is restricted to them. Of course, universals are used to organize and characterize the particulars, but they are not themselves subject to being organized and characterized (e.g., by means of metaproperties).
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DnS (Descriptions and Situations), developed by Aldo Gangemi (STLab, Rome), is a constructivist ontology that pushes DOLCE’s descriptive stance even further. DnS does not put restrictions on the type of entities and relations that one may want to postulate, either as a domain specification, or as an upper ontology, and it allows for context-sensitive ‘redescriptions’ of the types and relations postulated by other given ontologies (or ‘ground’ vocabularies). The current OWL encoding of DnS assumes DOLCE as a ground top-level vocabulary. DnS and related modules also exploit ‘CPs’ (Content ontology design Patterns), which provide a framework to annotate ‘focused’ fragments of a reference ontology (i.e., the parts of an ontology containing the types and relations that underlie ‘expert reasoning’ in given fields or communities). The combination of DOLCE and DnS has been used to build a planning ontology known as DDPO (DOLCE+DnS Plan Ontology).
Both DOLCE and DnS are particularly devoted to the treatment of social entities, such as e.g. organizations, collectives, plans, norms, and information objects. It has also been used to study and create domain ontologies for sovereign states, geopolitical boundaries, and the agentivity of social entities. The DOLCE-2.1-Lite-Plus OWL version, including a number of DnS-based modules, has been and is being applied to several ontology projects.
A lighter OWL axiomatization of DOLCE and DnS, which also simplifies the names of many classes and properties, adds extensive inline comments, and thoroughly aligns to the repository of Content patterns is now available as DOLCE+DnS-Ultralite (abbreviated: DUL). Despite its simplification, which greatly speeds up consistency checking and classification of OWL domain ontologies that are plugged to it, the expressivity of DUL is not significantly different from the previous DOLCE-Lite-Plus. DOLCE OWL versions, DOLCE+DnS-Ultralite and the pattern repository are developed and maintained by Aldo Gangemi and his associates at Rome's Semantic Technology Lab.

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