Any Entity that cannot be located in space-time. E.g. mathematical entities: formal semantics elements, regions within dimensional spaces, etc.

An Event with at least one Agent that isParticipantIn it, and that executes a Task that typically isDefinedIn a Plan, Workflow, Project, etc.

Additional comment: a computational agent can be considered as a PhysicalAgent that realizes a certain class of algorithms (that can be considered as instances of InformationObject) that allow to obtain some behaviors that are considered typical of agents in general. For an ontology of computational objects based on DOLCE see e.g. http://www.loa-cnr.it/COS/COS.owl, and http://www.loa-cnr.it/KCO/KCO.owl.

A quantity, independently from how it is measured, computed, etc.

A special kind of Situation that allows to include time indexing for the classifies relation in situations. For example, if a Situation s 'my old cradle is used in these days as a flower pot' isSettingFor the entity 'my old cradle' and the TimeIntervals '8June2007' and '10June2007', and we know that s satisfies a functional Description for aesthetic objects, which defines the Concepts 'flower pot' and 'flower', then we also need to know what concept classifies 'my old cradle' at what time. In order to solve this issue, we need to create a sub-situation s' for the classification time: 'my old cradle is a flower pot in 8June2007'. Such sub-situation s' isPartOf s.

Any container for entities that share one or more common properties. E.g. "stone objects", "the nurses", "the Louvre Aegyptian collection", all the elections for the Italian President of the Republic. A collection is not a logical class: a collection is a first-order entity, while a class is second-order. A collection is neither an aggregate of its member entities (see e.g. ObjectAggregate class).

A Collection whose members are agents, e.g. "the nurses", "the Italian rockabilly fans". Collectives, facon de parler, can act as agents, although they are not assumed here to be agents (they are even disjoint from the class SocialAgent). This is represented by admitting collectives in the range of the relations having Agent in their domain or range.

A SocialAgent that is actedBy agents that are (and act as) members of a Collective. A collective agent can have roles that are also roles of those agents. For example, in sociology, a 'group action' is the situation in which a number of people (that result to be members of a collective) in a given area behave in a coordinated way in order to achieve a (often common) goal. The Agent in such a Situation is not single, but a CollectiveAgent (a Group). This can be generalized to the notion of social movement, which assumes a large Community or even the entire Society as agents. The difference between a CollectiveAgent and an Organization is that a Description that introduces a CollectiveAgent is also one that unifies the corresponding Collective. In practice, this difference makes collective agents 'less stable' than organizations, because they have a dedicated, publicly recognizable Description that is conceived to introduce them.

A Concept is a SocialObject, and isDefinedIn some Description; once defined, a Concept can be used in other Description(s). If a Concept isDefinedIn exactly one Description, see the LocalConcept class. The classifies relation relates Concept(s) to Entity(s) at some TimeInterval

A collection whose members are 'unified', i.e. organized according to a certain schema that can be represented by a Description. Typically, a configuration is the collection that emerges out of a composed entity: an industrial artifact, a plan, a discourse, etc. E.g. a physical book has a configuration provided by the part-whole schema that holds together its cover, pages, ink. That schema, based on the individual relations between the book and its parts, can be represented in a reified way by means of a (structural) description, which is said to 'unify' the book configuration.

(The content of) an agreement between at least two agents that play a Party Role, about some contract object (a Task to be executed).

A Description is a SocialObject that represents a conceptualization. It can be thought also as a 'descriptive context' that uses or defines concepts in order to create a view on a 'relational context' (cf. Situation) out of a set of data or observations. For example, a Plan is a Description of some actions to be executed by agents in a certain way, with certain parameters; a Diagnosis is a Description that provides an interpretation for a set of observed entities, etc. Descriptions 'define' or 'use' concepts, and can be 'satisfied' by situations.

A Description of the Situation, in terms of structure and function, held by an Entity for some reason. A design is usually accompanied by the rationales behind the construction of the designed Entity (i.e. of the reasons why a design is claimed to be as such). For example, the actual design (a Situation) of a car or of a law is based on both the specification (a Description) of the structure, and the rationales used to construct cars or laws. While designs typically describe entities to be constructed, they can also be used to describe 'refunctionalized' entities, or to hypothesize unknown functions. For example, a cradle can be refunctionalized as a flowerpot based on a certain home design.

A PhysicalArtifact that is also described by a Design. This excludes simple recycling or refunctionalization of natural objects. Most common sense 'artifacts' can be included in this class: cars, lamps, houses, chips, etc.

DesignedSubstance

A Description of the Situation of a system, usually applied in order to control a normal behaviour, or to explain a notable behavior (e.g. a functional breakdown).

Anything: real, possible, or imaginary, which some modeller wants to talk about for some purpose.

Any physical, social, or mental process, event, or state. More theoretically, events can be classified in different ways, possibly based on 'aspect' (e.g. stative, continuous, accomplishement, achievement, etc.), on 'agentivity' (e.g. intentional, natural, etc.), or on 'typical participants' (e.g. human, physical, abstract, food, etc.). Here no special direction is taken, and the following explains why: events are related to observable situations, and they can have different views at a same time. If a position has to be suggested here anyway, the participant-based classification of events seems the most stable and appropriate for many modelling problems. (1) Alternative aspectual views Consider a same event 'rock erosion in the Sinni valley': it can be conceptualized as an accomplishment (what has brought a certain state to occur), as an achievement (the state resulting from a previous accomplishment), as a punctual event (if we collapse the time interval of the erosion into a time point), or as a transition (something that has changed from a state to a different one). In the erosion case, we could therefore have good motivations to shift from one aspect to another: a) causation focus, b) effectual focus, c) historical condensation, d) transition (causality). The different views refer to the same event, but are still different: how to live with this seeming paradox? A typical solution e.g. in linguistics (cf. Levin's aspectual classes) and in DOLCE Full (cf. WonderWeb D18 axiomatization) is to classify events based on aspectual differences. But this solution would create different identities for a same event, where the difference is only based on the modeller's attitude. An alternative solution is suggested here, and exploits the notion of (observable) Situation; a Situation is a view, consistent with a Description, which can be observed of a set of entities. It can also be seen as a 'relational context' created by an observer on the basis of a 'frame'. Therefore, a Situation allows to create a context where each particular view can have a proper identity, while the Event preserves its own identity. For example, ErosionAsAccomplishment is a Situation where rock erosion is observed as a process leading to a certain achievement: the conditions (roles, parameters) that suggest such view are stated in a Description, which acts as a 'theory of accomplishments'. Similarly, ErosionAsTransition is a Situation where rock erosion is observed as an event that has changed a state to another: the conditions for such interpretation are stated in a different Description, which acts as a 'theory of state transitions'. Consider that in no case the actual event is changed or enriched in parts by the aspectual view. (2) Alternative intentionality views Similarly to aspectual views, several intentionality views can be provided for a same Event. For example, one can investigate if an avalanche has been caused by immediate natural forces, or if there is any hint of an intentional effort to activate those natural forces. Also in this case, the Event as such has not different identities, while the causal analysis generates situations with different identities, according to what Description is taken for interpreting the Event. On the other hand, if the possible actions of an Agent causing the starting of an avalanche are taken as parts of the Event, then this makes its identity change, because we are adding a part to it. Therefore, if intentionality is a criterion to classify events or not, this depends on if an ontology designer wants to consider causality as a relevant dimension for events' identity. (3) Alternative participant views A slightly different case is when we consider the basic participants to an Event. In this case, the identity of the Event is affected by the participating objects, because it depends on them. For example, if snow, mountain slopes, wind, waves, etc. are considered as an avalanche basic participants, or if we also want to add water, human agents, etc., that makes the identity of an avalanche change. Anyway, this approach to event classification is based on the designer's choices, and more accurately mirrors lexical or commonsense classifications (see. e.g. WordNet 'supersenses' for verb synsets). Ultimately, this discussion has no end, because realists will keep defending the idea that events in reality are not changed by the way we describe them, while constructivists will keep defending the idea that, whatever 'true reality' is about, it can't be modelled without the theoretical burden of how we observe and describe it. Both positions are in principle valid, but, if taken too radically, they focus on issues that are only partly relevant to the aim of computational ontologies, which assist domain experts in representing a certain portion of reality according to their own assumptions and requirements. For this reason, in this ontology version of DOLCE, both events and situations are allowed, together with descriptions (the reason for the inclusion of the D&S framewrok in DOLCE), in order to encode the modelling needs, independently from the position (if any) chosen by the model designer.

A Concept that classifies an Event . An event type describes how an Event should be interpreted, executed, expected, seen, etc., according to the Description that the EventType isDefinedIn (or used in)

Entities that are formally defined and are considered independent from the social context in which they are used. They cannot be localized in space or time. Also called 'Platonic entities'. Mathematical and logical entities are included in this class: sets, categories, tuples, costants, variables, etc. Abstract formal entities are distinguished from information objects, which are supposed to be part of a social context, and are localized in space and time, therefore being (social) objects. For example, the class 'Quark' is an abstract formal entity from the purely set-theoretical perspective, but it is an InformationObject from the viewpoint of ontology design, when e.g. implemented in a logical language like OWL. Abstract formal entities are also distinguished from Concept(s), Collection(s), and Description(s), which are part of a social context, therefore being SocialObject(s) as well. For example, the class 'Quark' is an abstract FormalEntity from the purely set-theoretical perspective, but it is a Concept within history of science and cultural dynamics. These distinctions allow to represent two different notions of 'semantics': the first one is abstract and formal ('formal semantics'), and formallyInterprets symbols that are about entities whatsoever; for example, the term 'Quark' isAbout the Collection of all quarks, and that Collection isFormalGroundingFor the abstract class 'Quark' (in the extensional sense). The second notion is social, localized in space-time ('social semantics'), and can be used to interpret entities in the intensional sense. For example, the Collection of all quarks isCoveredBy the Concept 'Quark', which is also expressed by the term 'Quark'.

The Description of a Situation that is desired by an Agent, and usually associated to a Plan that describes how to actually achieve it

A CollectiveAgent whose acting agents conceptualize a same SocialRelation .

A piece of information, such as a musical composition, a text, a word, a picture, independently from how it is concretely realized.

A concrete realization of an InformationObject, e.g. the written document (object) containing the text of a law, a poetry reading (event), the dark timbre (quality) of a sound (event) in the execution (event) of a musical composition, realizing a 'misterioso' tempo indication. The realization of an information object also realizes information about itself. This is a special semiotic feature, which allows to avoid a traditonal paradox, by which an information is often supposed to be about itself besides other entities (e.g. the information object 'carpe diem' is about its meaning in Horace's Odes (let alone its fortune in Western culture and beyond), but also about its expression in context: 'dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero', with the sound and emotional relations that it could activate. This is expressed in OWL2 with a local reflexivity axiom of the dul:InformationRealization class.

InformationEntity

A Concept that isDefinedIn exactly 1 Description. For example, the Concept 'coffee' in a 'preparesCoffee' relation can be defined in that relation, and for all other Description(s) that use it, the isConceptUsedIn property should be applied. Notice therefore that not necessarily all Concept(s) isDefinedIn exactly 1 Description.

A method is a Description that defines or uses concepts in order to guide carrying out actions aimed at a solution with respect to a problem. It is different from a Plan, because plans could be carried out in order to follow a method, but a method can be followed by executing alternative plans.

A person in the physical commonsense intuition: 'have you seen that person walking down the street?'

A social norm.

Any physical, social, or mental object, or a substance. Following DOLCE Full, objects are always participating in some event (at least their own life), and are spatially located.

ObjectAggregate

A physical objects with biological characteristics, typically that organisms can self-reproduce.

An internally structured, conventionally created SocialAgent, needing a specific Role and Agent that plays it, in order to act.

A Concept that classifies a Region; the difference between a Region and a Parameter is that regions represent sets of observable values, e.g. the height of a given building, while parameters represent constraints or selections on observable values, e.g. 'VeryHigh'. Therefore, parameters can also be used to constrain regions, e.g. VeryHigh on a subset of values of the Region Height applied to buildings, or to add an external selection criterion , such as measurement units, to regions, e.g. Meter on a subset of values from the Region Length applied to the Region Length applied to roads.

A special kind of Situation that allows to include time indexing for the hasPart relation in situations. For example, if a Situation s 'finally, my bike has a luggage rack' isSettingFor the entity 'my bike' and the TimeIntervals 'now', or more specifically '29March2021', we need to have a time-index the part relation. With Parthood, we use includesWhole and includesPart properties. This can be done similarly for other arguments of parthood, e.g. location, configuration, topology, etc. Concerning the possible property characteristics reused from mereology (transitivity, asymmetry, reflexivity), they need to be implemented by means of rules (or, in a limited way, property chains using the binary hasPart or hasProperPart properties). A key is also added to ensure identification constraints of time-indexed parthood.

Any invariance detected from a dataset, or from observation; also, any invariance proposed based on top-down considerations. E.g. patterns detected and abstracted by an organism, by pattern recognition algorithms, by machine learning techniques, etc. An occurrence of a pattern is an 'observable', or detected Situation

Persons in commonsense intuition, which does not apparently distinguish between either natural or social persons.

A social entity with agentive features, but whose status is the result of a cultural transformation from e.g. a PhysicalObject, an Event, an Abstract, another SocialObject, etc. For example: the holy grail, deus ex machina, gods, magic wands, etc.

A PhysicalObject that is capable of self-representing (conceptualizing) a Description in order to plan an Action. A PhysicalAgent is a substrate for (actsFor) a Social Agent

Any PhysicalObject that isDescribedBy a Plan . This axiomatization is weak, but allows to talk of artifacts in a very general sense, i.e. including recycled objects, objects with an intentional functional change, natural objects that are given a certain function, even though they are not modified or structurally designed, etc. PhysicalArtifact(s) are not considered disjoint from PhysicalBody(s), in order to allow a dual classification when needed. E.g., FunctionalSubstance(s) are included here as well. Immaterial (non-physical) artifacts (e.g. texts, ideas, cultural movements, corporations, communities, etc. can be modelled as social objects (see SocialObject), which are all 'artifactual' in the weak sense assumed here.

Physical value of a physical object, e.g. density, color, etc.

Physical bodies are PhysicalObject(s), for which we tend to neutralize any possible artifactual character. They can have several granularity levels: geological, chemical, physical, biological, etc.

Any Object that has a proper space region. The prototypical physical object has also an associated mass, but the nature of its mass can greatly vary based on the epistemological status of the object (scientifically measured, subjectively possible, imaginary).

A physical object that is inherently located; for example, a water area.

Socially or cognitively dependent locations: political geographic entities (Rome, Lesotho), and non-material locations determined by the presence of other entities ("the area close to Rome") or of pivot events or signs ("the area where the helicopter fell"), as well as identified as complements to other entities ("the area under the table"), etc. In this generic sense, a Place is a 'dependent' location. For 'non-dependent' locations, cf. the PhysicalPlace class. For an abstract (dimensional) location, cf. the SpaceRegion class.

A Description having an explicit Goal, to be achieved by executing the plan

Plan executions are situations that proactively satisfy a plan. Subplan executions are proper parts of the whole plan execution.

This is a placeholder for events that are considered in their evolution, or anyway not strictly dependent on agents, tasks, and plans. See Event class for some thoughts on classifying events. See also 'Transition'.

A Plan that defines Role(s), Task(s), and a specific structure for tasks to be executed in relation to goals to be achieved, in order to achieve the main goal of the project. In other words, a project is a plan with a subgoal structure and multiple roles and tasks.

Any aspect of an Entity (but not a part of it), which cannot exist without that Entity. For example, the way the surface of a specific PhysicalObject looks like, or the specific light of a place at a certain time, are examples of Quality, while the encoding of a Quality into e.g. a PhysicalAttribute should be modeled as a Region. From the design viewpoint, the Quality-Region distinction is useful only when individual aspects of an Entity are considered in a domain of discourse. For example, in an automotive context, it would be irrelevant to consider the aspects of car windows for a specific car, unless the factory wants to check a specific window against design parameters (anomaly detection). On the other hand, in an antiques context, the individual aspects for a specific piece of furniture are a major focus of attention, and may constitute the actual added value, because the design parameters for old furniture are often not fixed, and may not be viewed as 'anomalies'.

Any region in a dimensional space (a dimensional space is a maximal Region), which can be used as a value for a quality of an Entity . For example, TimeInterval, SpaceRegion, PhysicalAttribute, Amount, SocialAttribute are all subclasses of Region. Regions are not data values in the ordinary knowledge representation sense; in order to get patterns for modelling data, see the properties: representsDataValue and hasDataValue

Relations are descriptions that can be considered as the counterpart of formal relations (that are included in the FormalEntity class). For example, 'givingGrantToInstitution(x,y,z)' with three argument types: Provider(x),Grant(y),Recipient(z), can have a Relation counterpart: 'GivingGrantToInstitution', which defines three Concept instances: Provider,Grant,Recipient. Since social objects are not formal entities, Relation includes here any 'relation-like' entity in common sense, including social relations.

A legal position by which an Agent is entitled to obtain something from another Agent , under specified circumstances, through an enforcement explicited either in a Law, Contract , etc.

A Concept that classifies an Object

A view, consistent with ('satisfying') a Description, on a set of entities. It can also be seen as a 'relational context' created by an observer on the basis of a 'frame' (i.e. a Description). For example, a PlanExecution is a context including some actions executed by agents according to certain parameters and expected tasks to be achieved from a Plan; a DiagnosedSituation is a context of observed entities that is interpreted on the basis of a Diagnosis, etc. Situation is also able to represent reified n-ary relations, where isSettingFor is the top-level relation for all binary projections of the n-ary relation. If used in a transformation pattern for n-ary relations, the designer should take care of adding (some or all) OWL2 keys, corresponding to binary projections of the n-ary, to a subclass of Situation. Otherwise the 'identification constraint' (Calvanese et al., IJCAI 2001) might be violated.

Any individual whose existence is granted simply by its social communicability and capability of action (through some PhysicalAgent).

Any Region in a dimensional space that is used to represent some characteristic of a SocialObject, e.g. judgment values, social scalars, statistical attributes over a collection of entities, etc.

Any Object that exists only within some communication Event, in which at least one PhysicalObject participates in. In other words, all objects that have been or are created in the process of social communication: for the sake of communication (InformationObject), for incorporating new individuals (SocialAgent, Place), for contextualizing or intepreting existing entities (Description, Concept), or for collecting existing entities (Collection). Being dependent on communication, all social objects need to be expressed by some information object (information objects are self-expressing).

A SocialAgent that needs the existence of a specific NaturalPerson in order to act (but the lifetime of the NaturalPerson has only to overlap that of the SocialPerson).

Any social relationship

Any Region in a dimensional space that is used to localize an Entity ; i.e., it is not used to represent some characteristic (e.g. it excludes time intervals, colors, size values, judgment values, etc.). Differently from a Place , a space region has a specific dimensional space.

SpatioTemporalRegion

Any PhysicalBody that has not necessarily specified (designed) boundaries, e.g. a pile of trash, some sand, etc. In this sense, an artistic object made of trash or a dose of medicine in the form of a pill would be a FunctionalSubstance, and a DesignedArtifact, since its boundaries are specified by a Design; aleatoric objects that are outcomes of an artistic process might be still considered DesignedArtifact(s), and Substance(s).

An EventType that classifies an Action to be executed. For example, reaching a destination is a task that can be executed by performing certain actions, e.g. driving a car, buying a train ticket, etc. The actions to execute a task can also be organized according to a Plan that is not the same as the one that defines the task (if any). For example, reaching a destination could be defined by a plan to get on holidays, while the plan to execute the task can consist of putting some travels into a sequence.

A Theory is a Description that represents a set of assumptions for describing something, usually general. Scientific, philosophical, and commonsense theories can be included here. This class can also be used to act as 'naturalized reifications' of logical theories (of course, they will be necessarily incomplete in this case, because second-order entities are represented as first-order ones).

Thing

Any Region in a dimensional space that aims at representing time.

A Situation that includes a time indexing in its setting, so allowing to order any binary relation (property) with time.

A transition is a Situation that creates a context for three TimeInterval(s), two additional different Situation(s), one Event, one Process, and at least one Object: the Event is observed as the cause for the transition, one Situation is the state before the transition, the second Situation is the state after the transition, the Process is the invariance under some different transitions (including the one represented here), in which at least one Object is situated. Finally, the time intervals position the situations and the transitional event in time. This class of situations partly encodes the ontology underlying typical engineering algebras for processes, e.g. Petri Nets. A full representation of the transition ontology is outside the expressivity of OWL, because we would need qualified cardinality restrictions, coreference, property equivalence, and property composition.

A Collection whose members are the maximal set of individuals that share the same (named) type, e.g. "the gem stones", "the Italians". This class is very useful to apply a variety of the so-called "ClassesAsValues" design pattern, when it is used to talk about the extensional aspect of a class. An alternative variety of the pattern applies to the intensional aspect of a class, and the class Concept should be used instead.

Units of measure are conceptualized here as parameters on regions, which can be valued as datatype values.

A Plan that defines Role(s), Task(s), and a specific structure for tasks to be executed, usually supporting the work of an Organization