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DOLCE: A Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering
Stefano Borgo, Roberta Ferrario, Aldo Gangemi, Nicola Guarino, Claudio Masolo, Daniele Porello, Emilio M. Sanfilippo, Laure Vieu
TL;DR
DOLCE addresses how a foundational ontology can provide coherent, reusable categories and relations across domains. It combines philosophically grounded, cognitively and linguistically informed modeling with rich formal axiomatization, and its long-term stability and broad reuse support interoperability across applications and resources.
Problem
DOLCE provides reusable foundational categories and relations rather than domain knowledge, addressing the need to integrate domain ontologies and mediate across application areas.
Method
DOLCE uses descriptive, cognitively and linguistically informed categories, OntoClean-based analysis, and rich first-order modal axiomatization.
Results
DOLCE has remained stable while being reused across diverse domains and applied to improve resources such as DBpedia and WordNet.
Takeaways & Limitations
DOLCE provides a stable basis for domain modeling, interoperability, and reuse across standards and public semantic resources.
Takeaways & Limitations
DOLCE’s mesoscopic categories may change as scientific knowledge or social consensus evolves.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
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.
Introduction
DOLCE provides reusable foundational categories and relations for domain modeling, grounded in philosophical analysis and expressed through rich formal axiomatization. Its descriptive categories reflect natural language, cognition, and social practices, while sacrificing computability for expressiveness.
- DOLCE provides general categories and relations that can be specialized for different application domains.
- Philosophical grounding and careful characterization of categories and relations improve the prospects for interoperability among domain ontologies aligned to the same foundation.
- DOLCE adopts a descriptive metaphysics whose mesoscopic categories reflect existing conceptualizations shaped by language, cognition, and social practices.
- DOLCE uses first-order modal logic to express analyzed meanings richly and semantically transparently, but this expressiveness makes the formalization noncomputable.Application-oriented languages therefore use approximated and partial translations.
A bit of history of DOLCE
DOLCE developed from the early WonderWeb formalization through lighter, extended, and simplified variants, while the present article combines the original ontology with concepts and roles. Across this evolution, DOLCE remained a stable basis for domain modeling and interoperability, with broad reuse and standards impact.
- The present article mainly follows Masolo et al.’s DOLCE while adding concepts such as roles introduced in later work.
- OntoClean techniques and class meta-property analysis underlie the ontological analysis used to formalize DOLCE.
- DOLCE-related work introduced concepts and social roles through reification, treating them as particulars in the domain of discourse.
- DOLCE-CORE simplified DOLCE for applications and broader philosophical acceptability, adding concepts, refined property distinctions, resemblance, quality spaces, parthood variants, time regularity, and revised basic categories.DOLCE-CORE calls endurants and perdurants objects and events, respectively.
- DOLCE remained fixed as a stable basis for modeling different domains while gaining modules for extension and specialization.These modules support coherent application and address representation and cognitive issues.
- DOLCE has been reused across diverse application areas and has supported improvements to resources including DBpedia and WordNet.Related standards and resources include CIDOC CRM and SSN; DOLCE is also becoming part of ISO 21838 and is available in CLIF.
1. Principles and structure of DOLCE
DOLCE organizes reality through distinctions among entities, time, dependence, processes, qualities, and relations. Its treatment of persistence, constitution, participation, and qualities supports commonsense modeling while distinguishing entities with different histories and properties.
- DOLCE’s basic categories are endurants, perdurants, qualities, and abstracts, with the taxonomy extended by Concept, Role, and Artefact.
- I. Continuant vs. occurrent: Endurants are wholly present whenever they exist and can change properties or parts, whereas perdurants unfold over time and can be only partially present.
- I. Continuant vs. occurrent: Participation connects endurants to perdurants at particular times, allowing entities to be in time through events such as lives or conference talks.
- II. Independent vs. dependent entity: DOLCE distinguishes independent entities from dependent entities such as features, whose existence depends on a physical object.
- III. Processes vs. events: Processes and events are perdurants distinguished through taxonomic and mereological properties such as cumulative versus non-cumulative behavior.
- IV. Properties, qualities, quantities: Qualities are perceivable or measurable particulars inhering in endurants or perdurants, while qualia identify positions of individual qualities within quality spaces.
- V. Function and Role: DOLCE does not formalize functions and roles directly; roles are represented as anti-rigid, founded social concepts connected to entities through classification.DOLCE-CORE uses different terminology, calling endurants objects and perdurants events.
- VI. Relations: Constitution relates co-located endurants or perdurants that remain distinguishable through different histories, persistence conditions, or relational properties.Parthood is time-indexed for endurants and atemporal for perdurants or abstracts.
2. The formalization of DOLCE in First-Order Logic
DOLCE formalizes its categories and relations in quantified modal logic, extending the original system with concepts, roles, and classification. The excerpt defines temporal mereology, qualities, existence, participation, constitution, and classification through typed axioms and relations.
- 2. The formalization of DOLCE in First-Order Logic: DOLCE’s formal theory uses first-order quantified modal logic QS5, adopting a possibilistic domain containing possible entities regardless of actual existence.
- 2. The formalization of DOLCE in First-Order Logic: The presented axiomatization is an excerpt focused on later examples and extends DOLCE with Concepts, Roles, and classification.The paper also reports prior exhaustive formalization and a consistency proof.
- 2.2. Mereology: DOLCE includes atemporal and time-dependent parthood, with temporary parthood typed over endurants and time and requiring both part and whole to be present.The formalization also defines proper part, overlap, binary sums, and unrestricted sums.
- 2.3. Quality and quale: The relation being a quality of is primitive, while quality types and quale definitions connect qualities to their bearers and positions in quality spaces.The excerpt distinguishes physical, temporal, and abstract qualities and defines temporal qualia for perdurants, endurants, and qualities.
- 2.4. Time and existence: Actual existence is represented by being present at, defined through an entity’s temporal quale and presence at a time.
- 2.5. Participation: Participation is typed between endurants, perdurants, and times, requires simultaneous presence, and imposes participation conditions on both entities and events.Constant participation is introduced as an additional relation.
- 2.6. Constitution: Constitution is a time-indexed relation between endurants or perdurants, with axioms enforcing typing, shared physical dependence, and asymmetry.K(x, y, t) reads that x constitutes y at time t.
- 2.7. Concepts, roles, and classification: Classification relates an endurant to a concept at a time, requires presence, is nonsymmetrical, and blocks circular classification; roles are anti-rigid and founded concepts.
3. Analysis and formalization in DOLCE: examples
The examples show how DOLCE’s categories and relations formalize composition, roles, event change, and concept evolution while accommodating alternative modeling choices.
- 3. Analysis and formalization in DOLCE: examples: The formalization examples use an added temporal ordering relation because standard DOLCE does not formalize one.The introduced relation orders non-overlapping atomic or convex time regions and also defines a weaker ordering allowing proper overlap.
- 3.1. Case 1: Composition/Constitution: DOLCE supports artifact-based and role-based modeling, leaving the choice dependent on whether being a table is essential or accidental.The artifact-based approach treats tables and legs as entities, whereas the role-based approach treats them as context-dependent roles; DOLCE is neutral between them.
- 3.1. Case 1: Composition/Constitution: DOLCE formalizes composition and constitution by distinguishing a table from its parts and constituent matter across successive times.The case introduces matter, physical objects, artefacts, tables, and table legs, together with parthood, constitution, presence, and temporal order.
- 3.1. Case 1: Composition/Constitution: After leg replacement, the table remains constituted by the same tabletop and other wood amounts but by a different amount of wood for the replaced leg.The formalization represents presence, component relations, and the temporal change from W4 to W4′.
- 3.2. Case 2: Roles: Case 2 models teacher and student as temporary roles dependent on a school context, with persons replacing one another across a break.The model uses persons, a class, and a school, together with agentive physical objects, social objects, roles, presence, classification, and temporal order.
- 3.4. Case 4: Event Change: Case 4 represents walking and turning events using processes, accomplishments, temporal qualities, direction and speed qualities, and a plan-execution relation.The event-change formalization specifies temporal intervals and initial and final instants for turning events.
- 3.5. Case 5: Concept Evolution: For concept evolution, DOLCE uses social objects, concepts, time, subsumption, presence, and classification to represent changing qualifications across history.The authors describe this modeling approach as natural for such scenarios and note that it can also apply to technology-dependent concepts such as roads.
4. Ontology usage and community impact
DOLCE supports multiple design approaches, from lightweight reuse to expressive axiomatic modeling, and has been widely reused to build, improve, and interoperate semantic resources across domains.
- DOLCE’s utility varies by application, ranging from reusing a few categories to applying full axiomatic versions, while its precise role in design methodologies remains unsettled.
- DUL was designed to popularize DOLCE for the Semantic Web through simplified semantics, extensions, and integrated ontology design patterns.
- DOLCE has been reused across diverse projects, including e-learning, medicine, law, robotics, manufacturing, cybersecurity, and process mining.
- DUL has improved semantic resources by identifying DBpedia inconsistencies, exposing modeling anti-patterns, reorganizing WordNet, and integrating linguistic databases in Framester.
- DOLCE supports three design approaches: minimal upper-ontology reuse, expressive axiomatic commitment, and coherence or consistency stabilization.
- DOLCE-based patterns can improve ontology quality and semantic interoperability by encoding modeling practices and revealing unwanted inferences.