This is a beta version (v0.7) of the OWL alignment of WordNet 1.6 Noun Synsets to the DOLCE-Lite-Plus ontology library.

For details on the DOLCE-Lite-Plus library, see http://www.loa-cnr.it/DOLCE.
If you want to browse DOLCE-Lite-Plus, and looking at the axioms, download the latest version (3942), and import it into OntoWordNet.

This file takes about 3 minutes to load into OilEd, and 8 minutes to load into Protégé (both measures taken on a PowerBook G4 1.5 GHz, 1Gb RAM, allowing 630Mb of memory to both OilEd and Protégé). On the other hand, OilEd does not seem able to visualize the entire taxonomy. In Protégé, saving modifications requires some time.

The alignment is part of the OntoWordNet programme, which aims at:

1) reengineering WordNet lexicon as a formal ontology, and in particular:
	1.1) distinguishing synsets that can be formalized as classes from those 	
		that can be formalized as individuals
	1.2) interpreting the hyperonymy relation of WordNet as either 
		owl:subClassOf or rdf:type
	1.3) interpreting lexical relations from WordNet as ontological relations
2) aligning the top-level of WordNet to a foundational ontology, allowing for 
	re-interpretation of hyperonymy (as owl:subClassOf) when it is the case
3) checking the consistency of the overall result, and correcting the cases for
	inconsistency
4) modularizing the resulting ontology into modules according to an initial 	
	proposal of 'domains', which will be revised and reinterpreted according to 
	logical and formal ontological principles
5) learning and revising formal domain relations (either from glosses or from corpora)

Until now, the tasks 1.1, 1.2, and 2 have been fulfilled as far as Noun Synsets are concerned. 
More than 60,000 OWL classes have been created, and almost 5,000 OWL individuals. About 20 classes and 10 individuals still need corrections and will
be included in the next version.
Almost 1,000 classes have been aligned to 90 DOLCE-Lite-Plus classes, in order to make sense of the main peculiarities of WordNet taxonomies when formal axioms constrain the intended meaning (as derived from DOLCE-Lite-Plus). 
Such alignment has been performed by interpreting WordNet noun synset taxonomy until the third or fourth level. In many branchings, I am convinced that lower levels are semantically consistent, while in others, I expect that further refinement is still needed.

The task 3) has been partly done, but corrections are not yet in place in this version (about 700 noun synsets of WordNet 1.6 have multiple hyperonyms, and some inconsistencies after alignment to DOLCE-Lite-Plus have been discovered).

Ongoing work is on tasks 1.3), 3), 4), and 5), and on the reengineering and alignment of the Verb and Adjective Synsets. Moreover, a mapping of OWN to WordNet 2.0 is envisaged in the short term.

For some of the principles underlying the alignment work and the OWN programme, see: 
- Gangemi A, Guarino N, Masolo C, Oltramari A, Restructuring WordNet's Top-Level, AI Magazine, Fall 2003.
- Gangemi A, Navigli R, Velardi P, The OntoWordNet Project: extension and axiomatization of conceptual relations in WordNet, Meersman R, et al. (eds.), Proceedings of ODBASE03 Conference, Springer, 2003.