Sweetening Ontologies with DOLCE

In this paper we introduce the DOLCE upper level ontology, the first module of a Foundational Ontologies Library being developed within the Wonder Web project. DOLCE is presented here in an intuitive way; the reader should refer to the project deliverable for a detailed axiomatization. A comparison with WordNet’s top-level taxonomy of nouns is also provided, which shows how DOLCE, used in addition to the OntoClean methodology, helps isolating and understanding some major WordNet’s semantic limitations. We suggest that such analysis could hopefully lead to an “ontologically sweetened” WordNet, meant to be conceptually more rigorous, cognitively transparent, and efficiently exploitable in several applications.