# DOLCE: A Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01597 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01597/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 0 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Aug 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

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- [KROMA: Ontology Matching with Knowledge Retrieval and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14032/) (2025)
- [Investigating Language Model Capabilities to Represent and Process Formal Knowledge: A Preliminary Study to Assist Ontology Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10249/) (2025)
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- [Situated Ground Truths: Enhancing Bias-Aware AI by Situating Data Labels with SituAnnotate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07583/) (2024)
- [Ontological foundations for contrastive explanatory narration of robot plans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22493/) (2025)
- [AI- and Ontology-Based Enhancements to FMEA for Advanced Systems Engineering: Current Developments and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17743/) (2025)
- [Knowledge Graph Re-engineering Along the Ontological Continuum (extended version)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22093/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

DOLCE, the first top-level (foundational) ontology to be axiomatized, has remained stable for twenty years and today is broadly used in a variety of domains. DOLCE is inspired by cognitive and linguistic considerations and aims to model a commonsense view of reality, like the one human beings exploit in everyday life in areas as diverse as socio-technical systems, manufacturing, financial transactions and cultural heritage. DOLCE clearly lists the ontological choices it is based upon, relies on philosophical principles, is richly formalized, and is built according to well-established ontological methodologies, e.g. OntoClean. Because of these features, it has inspired most of the existing top-level ontologies and has been used to develop or improve standards and public domain resources (e.g. CIDOC CRM, DBpedia and WordNet). Being a foundational ontology, DOLCE is not directly concerned with domain knowledge. Its purpose is to provide the general categories and relations needed to give a coherent view of reality, to integrate domain knowledge, and to mediate across domains. In these 20 years DOLCE has shown that applied ontologies can be stable and that interoperability across reference and domain ontologies is a reality. This paper briefly introduces the ontology and shows how to use it on a few modeling cases.