Abstract
dolce, the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (Masolo et al., 2003), is a foundational ontology developed embracing a pluralist perspective: there cannot be a unique standard or universal ontology for knowledge representation. Once it is accepted that the so-called “monolithic approach” is unrealistic, it becomes clear that the different foundational ontologies must be mutually transparent by making explicit their ontological stands and formal constraints: this is necessary to make ontology interaction possible and reliable. Roughly, it is expected that an ontology is, on the one hand, philosophically well founded (by adopting a clear ontological perspective) and, on the other hand, that it provides the information for its correct application and use (for instance, by describing explicitly the basic assumptions and the formal constraints on which it relies). A consequence of this view is that, whenever a foundational ontology does not make an explicit commitment with respect to an ontological topic, it is assumed that the ontology is consistent with alternative ontological positions in that topic (in some cases, it may even allow coexistence of these via techniques like parametrization). This general view is quite demanding and requires a careful analysis of the ontology content and structure; dolce has been one of the first ontologies explicitly built to follow (and exemplify) this approach.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The version we present here can be considered as the first proposal to update the ontology and it comes after almost 6 years of experience in applying it.
- 3.
See http://www.loa-cnr.it/DOLCE.html for a list of institution and projects that are using or have expressed interest in the dolce ontology.
- 4.
The different versions of dolce can be downloaded from http://www.loa-cnr.it/DOLCE.html. The main version is in first-order logic. Versions in other languages have been produced approximating the content of the FOL version by taking into account the different expressive powers of the other languages.
- 5.
- 6.
From http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/agbkb/forschung/formal_methods/CoFI/hets/index_e.htm: Hets is a parsing, static analysis and proof management tool combining various tools for different specification languages.
- 7.
Here we discuss the case of properties only. Relations are treated analogously.
- 8.
This solution allows to represent dynamics in the properties but it introduces a series of problems when considering roles, see Steimann (2000).
- 9.
Differently from that approach, here we do not rely on logical definitions for concepts, instead the intensional aspect is (partially) characterized by explicitly stating when concepts are different. Reviews of this topic that cover a variety of perspectives are in Steiman, (2000), Masolo et al. (2004) and Loebe (2007).
- 10.
Given the assumption of having just one time-space t, the constraint \(\textsc{t}(t) \rightarrow {\textsf{\small PRE}}(t,t)\) can be added without any additional restriction (see also axiom (A45)).
- 11.
From a perdurantist perspective (see Section 13.11) where entities are considered as four-dimensional “worms”, this simply means that two possibly different four-dimensional worms (x and y) have the same temporal slice at t.
- 12.
In the original version of dolce this relation is called quality and written qt.
- 13.
For those familiar with trope theory (Campbell, 1990), qualities can be seen as sums of tropes. Indeed, one can interpret a trope substitution as a change of quality location. The position adopted in dolce-core is compatible with trope theory without committing to the view that change corresponds to trope substitution.
- 14.
In the original version of dolce this relation is called quale and written ql. In dolce there was also a distinction between the immediate quale (a non temporary relation) and the temporary quale. Here we use one temporary relation only and assume that the temporal qualities of an event e at t correspond to the temporal qualities of the maximal part of e spanning t.
- 15.
Analogously, the ontology comprises the quality type “being space-located” which is not presented here.
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Borgo, S., Masolo, C. (2010). Ontological Foundations of dolce . In: Poli, R., Healy, M., Kameas, A. (eds) Theory and Applications of Ontology: Computer Applications. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8847-5_13
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