Development of foundational ontology for WONDERWEB
By defining shared and common domain theories, ontologies enable people and machines to communicate more effectively. DOLCE is a foundational ontology developed as part of the WONDERWEB Foundational Ontologies Library (WFOL). The library's development has been defined by a need for reliable foundational ontologies. These served as a reference point for development, providing a rigorous basis for studying, harmonising and integrating existing ontologies, as well as metadata standards. The WFOL involved extensive research, with each module in the library undergoing careful evaluation by experts. The first module of WFOL was DOLCE (Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering) which was not a candidate for a universal standard ontology. It was, in fact, a starting point for comparing and explaining the relationships with the other modules in the library. It also aided clarification of existing ontologies or linguistic resources like WordNet. DOLCE focussed on particulars rather than generals. Properties and relations are usually considered as universals and therefore they were not classified by this ontology. DOLCE took a multiplicative approach, whereby different entities can be located in the same space-time, which allowed assumptions to be made regarding incompatible essential properties. DOLCE has become a standard in formal ontology and is now used by researchers around the world. It is available in a number of formats, including KIF and OWL. Applications that have used DOLCE as a tool for the semantic integration of data cover many areas, including computational linguistics, agriculture and medicine.
