  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.
