WonderWeb

DOLCE : Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering

DOLCE is a foundational ontology developed and maintained by the ISTC-CNR Laboratory for Applied Ontology . It was originally developed within the WonderWeb project and was conceived as the first module of the WonderWeb Foundational Ontologies Library (WFOL) together with OCHRE and BFO. DOLCE has remained stable after its first release in 2002/2003. It is formally specified in first-order logic (FOL); its consistency has been proved by Oliver Kutz and Till Mossakowski (see paper ).


Main documentation on DOLCE

  • WonderWeb Deliverable 18: it includes the final axiomatization of DOLCE in FOL, as well as the presentation of the WonderWeb Foundational Ontologies Library. This deliverable is to be considered as the main, official documentation of DOLCE
  • WonderWeb Deliverable 17: it covers the first axiomatization of DOLCE in FOL
  • Borgo, S., & Masolo, C. (2009). Foundational choices in DOLCE. In Handbook on ontologies (pp. 361-381). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Some research papers based on DOLCE


Some methodological works


DOLCE in the Web Ontology Language (OWL)

Aldo Gangemi and colleagues have adapted and re-engineered DOLCE according to the expressivity of OWL. Their efforts resulted in various OWL models, among which DOLCE Lite ( download the ontology library) and Dolce+DnS Ultralite (DUL).
These ontologies depart from the official release of DOLCE under different aspects; e.g., they do not cover modality, nor temporal indexing, and include the representation of entities such as descriptions and situations which are not covered in DOLCE.

More about DOLCE

Link to LOA Homepage