Approximating DOLCE in OWL: The DOLCEbasic and DOLCEnaryRel Core Modules

Foundational ontologies are usually developed in powerful logical languages, while they are often implemented in applications via their formalisations in the Web Ontology language (OWL). These OWL formalisations are in fact approximations of the original theories, to cope with the well-known limited expressivity of OWL. In this paper, we propose a novel modular approach to the OWL rendering of the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (dolce). We start presenting two fundamental modules of dolce in OWL 2: (i) a core module of dolce (termed 'DOLCEbasicOWL'), which provides the main taxonomy and the binary relations of the foundational ontology and (ii) an extension (termed 'DOLCEnaryRelOWL') to deal with the n-ary relations of dolce (for n > 2). We examine how the OWL rendering requires approaching delicate and truly ontological issues to motivate the choices made to circumvent the limited expressivity. To provide a minimal justification of our approximation, we establish that the OWL 2 versions are compatible with the original version of dolce by offering an automated proof that the first-order version of dolce entails the translations into first-order logic of the OWL 2 modules. Other adequacy criteria are then discussed. Finally, we illustrate the functioning of our rendering by means of examples. We conclude by discussing a number of other modules to cope with other core concepts and specific domains.