DOLCE extensions and applications

Nicola GuarinoLaboratory for Applied Ontology

Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technology,National Research Council

Trento, Italy

Thanks to all LOA people!

www.loa-cnr.it

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DOLCEa Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive

Engineering

• Strong cognitive/linguistic bias: • descriptive (as opposite to prescriptive) attitude• Categories mirror cognition, common sense, and the lexical

structure of natural language.• Emphasis on cognitive invariants• Focus on design rationale to allow easy comparison

with different ontological options• Rigorous, systematic, interdisciplinary approach• Rich axiomatization

• 37 basic categories• 7 basic relations• 80 axioms, 100 definitions, 20 theorems

• Rigorous quality criteria• Documentation

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Methodology: Formal Ontological Analysis

• Theory of Essence and Identity

• Theory of Parts (Mereology)

• Theory of Wholes

• Theory of Dependence

• Theory of Composition and Constitution

• Theory of Properties and Qualities

The basis for a common ontology vocabulary

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Qualities and features:a fine-grained approach

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Main DOLCE Extensions(Thanks to Aldo Gangemi @LOA-RM)

• Allen-based ontology of time• Ontology of common-sense locations• Descriptions and reified concepts (D&S ontology)• Ontology of functional participation (thematic roles)

• Ontology of social entities and organizations • Ontology of plans and tasks• Ontology of information objects• Ontology of knowledge content objects (multimedia

descriptions )• Ontology of (Web) services (with UKA, VUA)• Ontology of semantic middleware (extending DAML-S

beyond Web services - by Daniel Oberle at UKA)• Core legal ontology (with ITTIG-CNR)

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Mapping with lexicons: the OntoWordNet project(Aldo Gangemi, Alessandro Oltramari, Massimiliano Ciaramita)

• 809 synsets from WordNet1.6 directly subsumed by a DOLCE+ class• Whole WordNet linked to DOLCE+• Lower WordNet levels still need revision

• Glosses being transformed into DOLCE+ axioms• Machine learning applied jointly with foundational

ontology

• WordNet “domains” being used to create a modular, general purpose domain ontology

• Ongoing work on ontological analysis of specific WordNet domains (cognition, emotion, psychological feature)

• Ongoing cooperation with Princeton University.

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A Selection of Most Relevant Projects (2003-2006)

• WonderWeb (FP5): Ontology Infrastructure for the Semantic Web

• METOKIS (FP6): Methodologies and tools infrastructure for the development of multimedia knowledge units

• SEMANTIC MINING (FP6 - NoE): Semantic Interoperability and Data Mining in Biomedicine

• TICCA (PAT&CNR): Ontology of social interaction 

• MOSTRO (PAT): Modelling Security and Trust Relationships in Organizations

• IKF : Intelligent Knowledge Fusion (Eureka Project)

• Ontology of banking transactions (with ELSAG Banklab )

• Ontology of Service-Level Agreement and IS monitoring (with SELESTA )

• Ontology of Insurance Services (with Nomos SpA)• FOS (UN/FAO): Alignment of legacy fishery ontologies

• TOCAI.IT (Italian Ministry of Research): semantic interoperability across 3 different industrial cooperation models: intra-enterprise integration, supply-chain integration, district level integration

• NEON (FP6) - Networked Ontologies

• ONTOGEO (FP6) - Geo-spatial Semantic Web

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The first book on the applications of DOLCE

From the introduction: “The advanced theory developed by Nicola Guarino and his group (the ISTC-CNR Laboratory for Applied Ontology, inventors of DOLCE and OntoClean) has so far been scattered across many papers. To the best of our knowledge, this book is the first document that carefully collects all the different contributions, puts them in concise definitions, and explains them by a running example. Thus, the book is the ultimate guide to everyone trying to familiarize with the foundational approach to ontological analysis developed at the Laboratory for Applied Ontology.”

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Main DOLCE users• Berlin-Brandeburgische Akademie der Wissenshaften (Christiane Fellbaum)• BioImage Database Development, Dept. of Zoology, University of Oxford, UK (Chris Catton)• CIDOC-CRM, ISO/CD 21127 (Martin Doerr)• W3C Semantic-Web Best Practices and Deployment (SWBPD) Working Group)• ELSAG SpA, Roma (Giovanni Siracusa)• UN/FAO Agricultural Ontology Service (Johannes Keizer)• IBM Software Group Rome Lab (Guido Vetere)• IBM Watson Research Center (Chris Welty)• Saarland University, Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Systems (Barry Smith)• University of Leipzig, Dept. of Computer Science (Heinrich Herre)• University Friedrich-Alexander, Dept. of Computer Science (Gunter Goerz)• Institute of Legal Information Theory and Technologies, CNR ･ Language and Computing, Belgium (Werner

Ceusters)• Nomos SpA, Milano (Massimo Soroldoni)• Ontology Works (Bill Andersen)• Selesta SpA, Roma• University of Amsterdam (Jost Breuker)• University of Bremen (John Bateman)• University of Queensland (Robert Colomb)• University of Torino, Dept. of Computer Science (Leonardo Lesmo)• University of Picardie Jules Verne (Gilles Kassel)• University of Geneva (Luc Schneider)• Griffith University, Australia (Philippe Martin)• University of Paris IV-Sorbonne, Laboratoire LaLICC (Antoine Isaac)• MUSIL Muenster Semantic Interoperability Lab (Werner Kuhn)

Large EU projects: - AceMedia- SmartWeb

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Downloadable versions of DOLCE

• DOLCE2.1-Lite-Plus: simplified translation of Dolce2.0 that does not consider: modality, temporal indexing, relation composition. It also includes some experimental modules for Plans, Information Objects, Semiotics, Temporal relations, Social notions, etc.

• OntoWordNet Project Beta version 0.7 of alignment of WordNet 1.6 Noun Synsets to DOLCE2.0-Lite-Plus

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A comment from a user at IBM Watson Research Center

• “Mapping our domain ontology to DOLCE helped us to understand and clarify our domain better”

Extra slides

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DOLCE taxonomy

QQuality

PQPhysicalQuality

AQAbstractQuality

TQTemporalQuality

PDPerduran

t

EVEvent

STVStative

ACHAchievement

ACCAccomplishment

STState

PROProcess

PTParticular

RRegion

PRPhysicalRegion

ARAbstractRegion

TRTemporalRegion

TTime

Interval

SSpaceRegion

ABAbstract

SetFact…

… … …

TLTemporalLocation

SLSpatialLocation

… … …

ASOAgentive Social Object

NASONon-agentive

Social Object

SCSociety

MOBMental Object

SOBSocial Object

FFeature

POBPhysicalObject

NPOBNon-physical

Object

PEDPhysicalEndurant

NPEDNon-physicalEndurant

EDEndurant

SAGSocial Agent

APOAgentive Physical Object

NAPONon-

agentive Physical Object

…

ASArbitrarySum

MAmount ofMatter

… … … …

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DOLCE's Basic Ontological Choices

• Endurants (aka continuants or objects) and Perdurants (aka occurrences or events)

• distinct categories connected by the relation of participation.

• Qualities

• Individual entities inhering in Endurants or Perdurants

• can live/change with the objects they inhere in

• Instance of quality kinds, each associated to a Quality Space representing the "values" (qualia) that qualities (of that kind) can assume. Quality Spaces are neither located in time nor in space.

• Multiplicative approach

• Different Objects/Events can be spatio-temporally co-localized: the relation of constitution is considered.

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Qualities

The rose and the chair have the same color: • different color qualities inhere to the two objects • they are located in the same quality region

Therefore, the same color attribute (red) is ascribed to the two objects

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Physical vs. Non-physical Endurants

• Physical endurants• Inherent spatial localization • Not necessarily dependent on other objects

• Non-physical endurants• No inherent spatial localization• Dependent on agents

• mental (depending on singular agents)• social (depending on communities of agents)

• Agentive: a company, an institution• Non-agentive: a law, the Divine Comedy, a linguistic

system…• Descriptions, an extension of DOLCE

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