ISO/IEC DIS 21838-3 Information technology - Top-level ontologies (TLO) - Part 3: Descriptive ontology for linguistic and cognitive engineering (DOLCE)

The Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) is a top-level ontology (TLO) conforming to ISO/IEC 21838-1. It contains definitions of its terms and relational expressions and formal representations in OWL 2 and in Common Logic (CL). DOLCE is a top-level ontology aimed at making explicit people-s assumptions about the nature and structure of the world, as reflected by natural language, cognition and human common sense. DOLCE is widely used by a diverse array of domain ontologies in areas like enterprise and process modeling, engineering, robotics, geographical information systems, socio-technical systems and digital humanities. The natural language specification of the DOLCE signature supports human maintenance and use of the ontology, including use in development of conformant domain ontologies. The adoption of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) as a W3C standard was motivated by the need to have a decidable ontology representation language as the basis for the Semantic Web. The OWL 2 formalization of DOLCE supports use of the ontology in computing, including enabling DOLCE to be used in tandem with other ontologies expressed in OWL and in related languages, and in allowing ontology quality control through use of OWL reasoners. The CL formalization of DOLCE provides the expressivity needed to provide an axiomatization whose models are the intended models of DOLCE. This axiomatization has a modular structure (see Figure 2 where the arrows represent the relation of extension of theories). This document conforms to ISO/IEC 21838-1.