Ontological foundations of DOLCE

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. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010.