DOLCE

Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) is a foundational ontology designed in 2002 in the context of the WonderWeb EU project, developed by Nicola Guarino and his associates at the Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA) [MaBo2002], [MaBo2003]. As implied by its acronym, DOLCE is oriented toward 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, which support the formal specification of domain conceptualizations.

DOLCE-Ultralite, designed by Aldo Gangemi and colleagues at the Semantic Technology Lab of National Research Council (Italy) is the Web Ontology Language (OWL) version of DOLCE. It simplifies some modal axioms of DOLCE, and extends it to cover the Descriptions and Situations framework, also designed in the WonderWeb project. DOLCE-Ultralite is the source of some core ontology design patterns, and is widely adopted in ontology projects worldwide.