DOLCE (Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering)


Title
DOLCE (Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering)
URI
http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/DOLCE-Lite.owl#
Description
DOLCE is the first module of the WonderWeb Foundational Ontologies Library (WFOL). DOLCE has a clear cognitive bias, in the sense that it aims at capturing the ontological categories underlying natural language and human common-sense. its authors believe that such bias is very important for the Semantic Web. DOLCE is an ontology of particulars, in the sense that its domain of discourse is restricted to them. A basic choice we make in DOLCE is the so-called multiplicative approach: different entities can be co-located in the same space-time (e.g. the vase and the amount of clay).
Languages
English
Ontology languages
OWL
Ontology format
RDF/XML
Alignments
See alignments

Evaluation results

The following evaluation results have been generated by the RESTFul web service provided by OOPS! (OntOlogy Pitfall Scanner!).

OOPS! logoIt is obvious that not all the pitfalls are equally important; their impact in the ontology will depend on multiple factors. For this reason, each pitfall has an importance level attached indicating how important it is. We have identified three levels:

Critical
It is crucial to correct the pitfall. Otherwise, it could affect the ontology consistency, reasoning, applicability, etc.
Important
Though not critical for ontology function, it is important to correct this type of pitfall.
Minor
It is not really a problem, but by correcting it we will make the ontology nicer.

Ontology terms lack annotations properties. This kind of properties improves the ontology understanding and usability from a user point of view.

This pitfall affects to the following ontology elements:

An ontology element is used in its own definition. For example, it is used to create the relationship "hasFork" and to establish as its range the following ���the set of restaurants that have at least one value for the relationship "hasFork".

This pitfall affects to the following ontology elements:

When an ontology is imported into another, classes with the same conceptual meaning that are duplicated in both ontologies should be defined as equivalent classes to benefit the interoperability between both ontologies. However, the ontology developer misses the definition of equivalent classes in the cases of duplicated concepts. An example of this pitfall can be not to have the equivalent knowledge explicitly defined between "Trainer" (class in the imported ontology) and "Coach" (class in the ontology about sports being developed).

This pitfall affects to the following ontology elements:

Guidelines in [5] suggest avoiding file extension in persistent URIs, particularly those related to the technology used, as for example ".php" or ".py". In our case we have adapted it to the ontology web languages used to formalized ontologies and their serializations. In this regard, we consider as pitfall including file extensions as ".owl", ".rdf", ".ttl", ".n3" and ".rdfxml" in an ontology URI. An example of this pitfall (at 29th June, 2012) could be found in the "BioPAX Level 3 ontology (biopax)" ontology��s URI (http://www.biopax.org/release/biopax-level3.owl) that contains the extension ".owl" related to the technology used.

*This pitfall applies to the ontology in general instead of specific elements and it appears in the ontology URI: http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/DOLCE-Lite.owl#

References: