A Comparison of Upper Ontologies

(Technical Report DISI-TR-06-21)

Viviana Mascardi1 , Valentina Cordì1 , Paolo Rosso2

1
Dipartimento di Informatica e Scienze dell’Informazione (DISI), Università degli Studi di
Genova, Via Dodecaneso 35, 16146, Genova, Italy
E-mail: {cordi,mascardi}@disi.unige.it
2
DSIC, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Camino de Vera s/n, 46022, Valencia Spain
E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract. Upper Ontologies are quickly becoming a key technology for inte-
grating heterogeneous knowledge coming from different sources. In this techni-
cal report we analyse 7 Upper Ontologies, namely BFO, Cyc, DOLCE, GFO,
PROTON, Sowa’s ontology, and SUMO, according to a set of standard software
engineering criteria, and we synthesise our analysis in form of a comparative ta-
ble. A summary of some existing comparisons drawn among subsets of the 7
Upper Ontologies that we deal with in this document, is also provided.

1 Introduction
Upper ontologies are quickly becoming a key technology for integrating heterogeneous
knowledge coming from different sources. In fact, they may be used by different par-
ties involved in a knowledge integration and exchange process as a reference, common
model of the reality.
The definition of upper ontology (also named top-level ontology, or foundation on-
tology) given by Wikipedia [22] is “an attempt to create an ontology which describes
very general concepts that are the same across all domains. The aim is to have a large
number on ontologies accessible under this upper ontology”.
In this report, we have described 7 upper ontologies along different criteria that
include dimension, implementation language(s), modularity, developed applications,
alignment with the WordNet lexical resource, and licensing. We have chosen these cri-
teria for three reasons:
– They are software engineering criteria useful for the developer of a knowledge-
based system that has to choose the most suitable Upper Ontology for his/her needs,
among a set of existing ones. Since all of us have a computer science background,
these criteria are more familiar to us than philosophical ones.
– They take into account some of the evaluation questions proposed by the IEEE
Standard Upper Ontology Working Group (http://suo.ieee.org/SUO/Eva-
luations/), and they also extend the criteria considered in an existing compari-
son among SUMO, Cyc, and DOLCE [18], thus allowing us to “reuse”, and to be
consistent with, the results already obtained there.
– They are not (easily) scientifically falsifiable.
 The choice of the 7 upper ontologies we have described, namely BFO, Cyc, DOLCE,
GFO, PROTON, Sowa’s ontology, and SUMO, is based on how much, to the best of our
knowledge, they are visible and used inside the research community. For example, we
have discussed all the Upper Ontologies referenced by Wikipedia, apart from WordNet
that we consider a lexical resource rather than an Upper Ontology, and from the Global
Justice XML Data Model and National Information Exchange Model, that addresses the
specific application domain of justice and public safety. We have reported alignments
between the Upper Ontologies and WordNet, when existing. To the 5 Upper Ontologies
considered by Wikipedia, we have added PROTON and Sowa’s ontology. We have also
cited three attempts to merge existing Upper Ontologies, namely COSMO, MSO, and
OntoMap, although we have not described them in detail since the first two ones are
still work in progress, and the last one is over since four years.
The methodology followed to draw this report consisted in checking the existing
literature, producing a first draft of the comparison based on the retrieved literature,
submitting it to the attention of the developers of all the 7 upper ontologies under com-
parison, and integrating the obtained answers and suggestions into the current version
of the report. Due to time constraints, we were not able to experiment with the upper
ontologies by our own. This “on the field” experimentation is part of our near future
work, and its results will be described in a companion technical report.
The report is organised in the following way: Section 2 provides a description of
the 7 upper ontologies, and Section 3 surveys some existing, partial comparisons drawn
in the past years among subsets of the Upper Ontologies that we describe in Section 2,
and provides a synthesis of the results of our comparison among them.

2 Description

Basic Formal Ontology (BFO)

– Status of this description. Validated by H. Stenzhorn, research associate and doc-

toral student at the IFOMIS and the University Hospital Freiburg - Medical Infor-
matics Department, and one of BFO’s developers.
– Home page. http://www.ifomis.org/bfo.
– Developers. B. Smith, P. Grenon, H. Stenzhorn, A. Spear (IFOMIS, Saarland Uni-
versity).
– Description. BFO consists in two sub-ontologies: SNAP – a series of snapshot
ontologies (Oti ), indexed by times – and SPAN – a single videoscopic ontology
(Ov ). An Oti is an inventory of all entities existing at a time, while an Ov is an
inventory of all processes unfolding through time. Both types of ontology serve as
basis for a series of sub-ontologies, each of which can be conceived as a window
on a certain portion of reality at a given level of granularity.
– History. The theory behind BFO has been developed and formulated by Smith and
Grenon in a series of publications starting in 1998. Its current implementation in
OWL has been developed by Stenzhorn with contributions from Spear.
– Dimensions. BFO contains 1 top connecting class (“Entity”), 18 SNAP classes,
and 17 SPAN classes for a total of 36 classes which are, in version 1.0 of the
 implementation, connected via the is_a relation. The forthcoming version of BFO
will incorporate relations between classes too.
– Implementation language(s). OWL [21].
– Modularity. BFO is divided into the SNAP and SPAN modules.
– Applications. BFO has been applied to the biomedical domain [8] and it is cur-
rently used in building an ontology for clinic-genomic trials on cancer (http:
//www.acgt-eu.org).
– Alignment with WordNet. Not supported.
– Licensing. BFO is freely available; its OWL implementation may be downloaded
from http://www.ifomis.org/bfo/1.0.

Cyc
– Status of this description. Validated by L. Lefkowitz, executive director for busi-
ness solutions at Cycorp.
– Home page. http://www.cyc.com/.
– Developers. Cycorp.
– Description. The Cyc Knowledge Base (KB) is a formalised representation of
facts, rules of thumb, and heuristics for reasoning about the objects and events
of everyday life. The KB consists of terms and assertions which relate those terms.
These assertions include both simple ground assertions and rules. The Cyc KB is
divided into thousands of “microtheories” focused on a particular domain of knowl-
edge, a particular level of detail, a particular interval in time, etc.
– History. The Cyc project was founded in 1984 by D. Leant as a lead project in the
Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC). In 1994, Cycorp
was founded to further develop, commercialize, and apply the Cyc technology. Cy-
corp offers a no-cost license to its semantic technologies development toolkit to
the research community (ResearchCyc). Additionally, it has placed the core Cyc
ontology (OpenCyc) into the public domain.
– Dimensions. The Cyc KB (including Cyc’s microtheories) contains more than
300,000 concepts and nearly 3,000,000 assertions (facts and rules), using more
than 15,000 relations.
– Implementation language(s). Cyc is represented in the CycL formal language
(http://www.cyc.com/cycdoc/ref/cycl-syntax.html). The latest release
of Cyc includes an Ontology Exporter that allows to export specified portions of
Cyc to OWL files.
– Modularity. The “microtheory” approach supports modularity.
– Applications. Cyc has been used in the domains of natural language processing,
in particular for the tasks of word sense disambiguation [4] and question answer-
ing [5], of network risk assessment [19], and of representation of terrorism-related
knowledge [6].
– Alignment with WordNet. The last release of Cyc (as well as of OpenCyc and
ResearchCyc) includes links between Cyc concepts and about 12,000 WordNet
synsets.
– Licensing. Cyc is a commercial product, but Cycorp also released OpenCyc (http:
//www.opencyc.org/), the open source version of the Cyc technology, and Re-
searchCyc (http://research.cyc.com/), namely the Full Cyc ontology, but
with a research-only license.
DOLCE (a Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering)

– Status of this description. Not validated by the ontology developer(s).

– Home page. http://www.loa-cnr.it/DOLCE.html.
– Developers. Researchers from the Laboratory for Applied Ontology, headed by N.
Guarino.
– Description. DOLCE is the first module of the WonderWeb Foundational Ontolo-
gies Library. DOLCE has a clear cognitive bias, in the sense that it aims at capturing
the ontological categories underlying natural language and human commonsense.
According to DOLCE, different entities can be co-located in the same space-time.
DOLCE is described by its authors as an “ontology of particulars”, which the au-
thors explain as meaning an ontology of instances, rather than an ontology of uni-
versals or properties. The taxonomy of the most basic categories of particulars as-
sumed in DOLCE includes, for example, abstract quality, abstract region, agentive
physical object, amount of matter, non-agentive physical object, physical quality,
physical region, process, temporal quality, temporal region.
– History. DOLCE has been developed as part of WonderWeb, a project funded as a
shared-cost RTD under the European Commission information society technologies
(IST) programme. WonderWeb started in 2002 and ended in 2004. Although the
project has already ended, DOLCE is actively maintained and used.
– Dimensions. Around one hundred of terms, and a similar number of axioms.
– Implementation language(s). First Order Logic, KIF [1], OWL.
– Modularity. The intended use of DOLCE is within a modular library of founda-
tional ontologies, but it is not currently divided into modules.
– Applications. According to the “DOLCE around the world” web page (http://
www.loa-cnr.it/dolcevar.html), there are many projects that use DOLCE,
including the LOIS Project – an international research project on multilingual in-
formation retrieval from legal databases –, SmartWeb – a centre of excellence in
research on intelligent computing technologies and their application to web-based
systems and services –, Language Technology for eLearning – a project funded by
the EC, and using multilingual language technology tools and semantic web tech-
niques for improving the retrieval of learning material –, AsIsKnown – a semantic-
based knowledge flow system for the European home textiles industry, also funded
by the EC –, and the Projects of the Laboratory for Applied Ontology.
– Alignment with WordNet. The OntoWordNet Project aims at aligning the top-
level of WordNet to DOLCE, in order to obtain an “ontologically sweetened”
lexical resource, meant to be conceptually more rigorous, cognitively transpar-
ent, and efficiently exploitable in several applications. The beta version (v0.72)
of the OWL alignment of WordNet 1.6 Noun Synsets to the DOLCE-Lite-Plus
ontology library consists of an alignment between DOLCE-Lite-Plus and about
100 Wordnet sysnsets, and can be downloaded from http://www.loa-cnr.it/
ontologies/OWN/OWN.owl.
– Licensing. The OWL version of DOLCE can be freely downloaded from http:
//www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/DLP3971.zip.

GFO (General Formal Ontology)

 – Status of this description. Validated by F. Loebe, PhD student at the University of
Leipzig under the supervision of H. Herre and M. Löffler, members of the scientific
board of Onto-Med.
– Home page. http://www.onto-med.de/ontologies/gfo.html.
– Developers. The Onto-Med Research Group (http://www.onto-med.de/).
– Description. GFO includes elaborations of categories like objects, processes, time
and space, properties, relations, roles, functions, facts, and situations. Work is in
progress on an integration with the notion of levels of reality in order to more
appropriately capture entities in the material, mental, and social areas.
– History. Work on GFO has started in 1999 in the context of the GOL project (Gen-
eral Ontological Language). Meanwhile, several directions of research have been
recognised and divided the initial project, such that GFO is now one component of
a larger framework. Work on GFO remains in progress, because the development
of top-level ontologies is a long-term research effort.
– Dimensions. The OWL version of GFO consists of 79 classes, 97 subclass-relations,
and 67 properties.
– Implementation language(s). The FOL axiomatization of GFO and a KIF imple-
mentation of it are forthcoming. An OWL-DL version also exists.
– Modularity. GFO exhibits a three-layered meta-ontological architecture consisting
of an abstract top level, an abstract core level, and a basic level. The foundational
ontology GFO is structured into several ontological modules including a module
for functions and a module for roles.
– Applications. One of the aims of the group Onto-Med is the application of the
GFO in the field of biomedical science. GFO has been used to represent knowl-
edge about biological functions in the Gene Ontology, the Celltype Ontology, and
the Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) Ontology [2], and GFO-Bio
(http://onto.eva.mpg.de/gfo-bio.html) is based on GFO and is a core
ontology for biology. Another area of application is the ontological foundation of
conceptual modelling. First examples of applying GFO to UML are demonstrated
in [9].
– Alignment with WordNet. Not supported.
– Licensing. The OWL version of GFO is released under the modified BSD Licence
(http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php) and can be
downloaded from http://www.onto-med.de/ontologies/gfo.owl.

PROTON (PROTo ONtology)

– Status of this description. Validated by A. Kiryakov, head of Ontotext Lab, mem-

ber of the board.
– Home page. http://proton.semanticweb.org/
– Developers. Ontotext Lab, Sirma (http://www.ontotext.com/).
– Description. PROTON (PROTo ONtology) is a basic upper-level ontology provid-
ing coverage of the general concepts necessary for a wide range of tasks, including
semantic annotation, indexing, and retrieval of documents. The design principles
can be summarized as follows (i) domain-independence; (ii) light-weight logical
definitions; (iii) alignment with popular standards; (iv) good coverage of named
 entities and concrete domains (i.e. people, organizations, locations, numbers, dates,
addresses).
– History. PROTON has been developed in the scope of SEKT, a project co-funded
by the EU 6th Framework programme. SEKT started the 1st of January, 2004 and
will conclude at the end of 2006. PROTON is a development of the KIMO ontol-
ogy, which had been created and used in the scope of the KIM platform for se-
mantic annotation, indexing, and retrieval (http://www.ontotext.com/kim/).
Currently, KIMO does not exist anymore; it is replaced by PROTON, KIMLO
(http://www.ontotext.com/kim/2005/04/kimlo#) and KIMSO (http://
www.ontotext.com/kim/2005/04/kimso#).
– Dimensions. PROTON contains about 300 classes and 100 properties.
– Implementation language(s) A fragment of OWL Lite.
– Modularity. PROTON is organized in three levels including four modules.
The System module ontology module occupies the first, basic layer. It defines sev-
eral notions and concepts of a technical nature that are substantial for the operation
of any ontology-based software, such as semantic annotation and knowledge ac-
cess tools. The Top ontology module occupies the second layer and includes basic
philosophically-reasoned distinctions between entity types, such as Object, Hap-
pening, Abstract. Further up-level, PROTON extends into its third layer, where
either of two independent ontologies, which defines much more specific classes,
can be used: PROTON Upper module or PROTON KM (Knowledge Management)
module. Examples of concepts belonging to these modules are Mountain, as a spe-
cific type of Location, and ResourceCollection as a sub-class of InformationRe-
source.
– Applications. As witnessed by a large number of publications (http://www.
ontotext.com/publications/), PROTON has been used in different domains
and for different purposes, including semantic annotation within the KIM platform,
and knowledge management systems in legal and telecommunications domain [3].
It has also been used as a basis for a domain ontologies in media research and anal-
ysis (project MediaCampaign) and research intelligence (project IST World), and a
basis for Business Data Ontology for Semantic Web Services [13].
– Alignment with WordNet. Not supported.
– Licensing. The four modules that compose PROTON are freely accessible via Web:
System module (http://proton.semanticweb.org/2005/04/protons); Top
module (http://proton.semanticweb.org/2005/04/protont); Upper mod-
ule (http://proton.semanticweb.org/2005/04/protonu); Knowledge Man-
agement module (http://proton.semanticweb.org/2005/04/protonkm).

Sowa’s Ontology

– Status of this description. Not validated by the ontology developer(s).

– Home page. http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/.
– Developers. J. F. Sowa.
– Description. Sowa’s ontology is based on [20]. The basic categories and distinc-
tions have been derived from a variety of sources in logic, linguistics, philosophy,
and artificial intelligence. To keep the system open-ended, Sowa’s ontology is not
 based on a fixed hierarchy of categories, but on a framework of distinctions, from
which the hierarchy is generated automatically. For any particular application, the
categories are not defined by drawing lines on a chart, but by selecting an appro-
priate set of distinctions. These categories include Object, Process, Schema, Script,
Juncture, Participation, Description, History, Structure, Situation, Reason, and Pur-
pose. Each of these categories may be either Physical or Abstract (and in both
cases, it can be either Continuant or Occurrent), and it may also be either Inde-
pendent, Relative, or Mediating. For example, Process is Physical, Occurrent and
Independent.
– History. Sowa’s ontology dates back to 1999. The two major influences on it are the
semiotics of C. Sanders Peirce and the categories of existence of A. North White-
head.
– Dimensions. The KIF encoding of Sowa’s ontology contains about 30 classes, 5
relationships among classes, and among classes and instances (has, instance-of,
subclass-of, temp-part-of, spatial-part-of), about 30 axioms.
– Implementation language(s). Sowa’s ontology uses a first-order modal language,
i.e., a first-order language with the modal operators “nec” and “poss”. A version
written in KIF also exists.
– Modularity. Sowa’s ontology is not explicitly divided into modules, although each
of the top level categories can be intended as a module by its own, connected to the
other ones by means of relations.
– Applications. Sowa’s ontology inspired many existing implemented upper ontolo-
gies, and thus its exploitation in the development of “second-generation” upper
ontologies may be seen as one, and probably the most relevant, of its practical ap-
plications.
– Alignment with WordNet. Not supported.
– Licensing. The KIF encoding of Sowa’s upper ontology can be freely downloaded
from http://suo.ieee.org/SUO/ontologies/Sowa.txt.

SUMO (Suggested Upper Merged Ontology)

– Status of this description. Validated by A. Pease, current Technical Editor of
SUMO.
– Home page. http://www.ontologyportal.org/.
– Developers. The SUMO starter document was created at Teknowledge by I. Niles
and A. Pease, with a contribution by C. Menzel.
– Description. SUMO and its domain ontologies [14] form one of the largest formal
public ontology in existence today. They are being used for research and applica-
tions in search, linguistics and reasoning. SUMO is extended with many domain
ontologies and a complete set of links to WordNet, and is freely available.
– History. SUMO was first released in December 2000. It was created at Teknowl-
edge Corporation and it was proposed as a starter document for the Standard Upper
Ontology Working Group (http://suo.ieee.org/), an IEEE-sanctioned work-
ing group of collaborators from the fields of engineering, philosophy, and informa-
tion science. SUMO was created by merging publicly available ontological content
into a single, comprehensive, and cohesive structure. This content included the on-
tologies available on the Ontolingua server (http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/
 software/ontolingua/), Sowa’s upper level ontology, and various mereotopo-
logical theories, among other sources.
– Dimensions. SUMO contains about 1000 terms and 4000 axioms; if we consider
also the terms and axioms of its domain ontologies, however, it reaches the dimen-
sion of 20,000 terms and 60,000 axioms.
– Implementation language(s). The first-order logic language SUO-KIF (http://
suo.ieee.org/SUO/KIF/suo-kif.html), OWL.
– Modularity. SUMO consists of SUMO itself (the official latest version on the IEEE
web site can be downloaded from http://suo.ieee.org/SUO/SUMO/SUMO_
173.kif), the MId-Level Ontology (MILO), and ontologies of Communications,
Countries and Regions, Distributed Computing, Economy, Finance, Engineering
Components, Geography, Government, Military, North American Industrial Clas-
sification System, People, Physical Elements, Transnational Issues, Transportation,
Viruses, World Airports. Additional ontologies of terrorism are available on re-
quest.
– Applications. The applications of SUMO are documented by the almost one hun-
dred published papers describing its use (http://www.ontologyportal.org/
Pubs.html). The largest user community is in linguistics, but other classes of ap-
plications include “pure” representation, and reasoning. Applications range from
academic to government, to industrial ones.
– Alignment with WordNet. SUMO has been mapped to all of Wordnet v2.1 by
hand. The mappings can be downloaded from http://sigmakee.cvs.source-
forge.net/sigmakee/KBs/WordNetMappings/.
– Licensing. SUMO is free and owned by the IEEE. Its SUO-KIF implementation
can be downloaded from http://sigmakee.cvs.sourceforge.net/*check-
out*/sigmakee/KBs/Merge.kif, while the OWL implementation can be down-
loaded from http://www.ontologyportal.org/translations/SUMO.
owl.txt. The ontologies that extend SUMO are available under GNU General
Public License.

Merging Upper Level Ontologies. Three attempts to merge some of the upper level on-
tologies, thus leading to an “upper-upper level ontology”, are COSMO (COmmon Se-
mantic MOdel, http://colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?CosmoWG/TopLe-
vel), MSO (Multi-Source Ontology, http://www.webkb.org/doc/MSO.html), and
the OntoMap Project [11].
COSMO results from the efforts of the COSMO working group (COSMO-WG)
and its parent group, the Ontology and Taxonomy Coordinating Working Group (ON-
TACWG). COSMO is viewed as consisting of a lattice of ontologies which will serve as
a set of basic logically-specified concepts (classes, relations, functions, instances) with
which the meanings of all terms and concepts in domain ontologies can be specified.
The use of a common set of defining concepts will permit accurate interoperability of
knowledge-based systems using the logical relations of their ontologies as the basis for
reasoning in the system. Currently, COSMO integrates concepts from the OpenCyc and
SUMO ontologies, with some classes from DOLCE and BFO. The work on COSMO is
in progress.
 MSO is the Multi-Source Ontology of WebKB-2, a knowledge server that permits
Web users to browse and update private knowledge bases on their machines, or alterna-
tively, a large shared knowledge base on the server machine. The ontology of the shared
knowledge base is currently an integration of various top-level ontologies and a lexical
ontology derived from an extension and correction of the noun-related part of Word-
Net 1.7. The semantics of some categories from WordNet has been modified in order
to fix inconsistencies, while the semantics of categories from other sources (e.g. Sowa,
DOLCE) has been kept. Also the work regarding the MSO is still in progress. In partic-
ular, the integration of the SUMO is still far from being complete. This integration links
the SUMO categories to the existing categories of the MSO, adds some structure when
needed, adds equivalent categories the names of which are better suited for knowledge
representation conventions that are “common” in the communities using graph-based
or frame-based notations, and finally translates the axioms from KIF to more intuitive
notations that permit people to more easily understand the meanings of the categories
and their relationships.
Finally, OntoMap was a project with the goal to facilitate the access, understand-
ing, and reuse of such resources. A semantic framework on conceptual level was im-
plemented that was small and easy enough to be learned on-the-fly. Technically, On-
toMap was implemented as a web-site providing access to several upper-level ontolo-
gies and manual mapping between them. OntoMap was similar in spirit to COSMO
and MSO, but only the very top concepts of each of the Upper Ontologies consid-
ered there were aligned. Unfortunately, OntoMap was over 4 years ago, and no main-
tenance was guaranteed to it. The web-portal which was allowing online browsing
is no longer available, but the stand-alone viewer may be downloaded from http:
//www.ontotext.com/projects/OntoMapViewer/install.htm.

3 Comparison

Some partial comparisons exist among subsets of the Upper Ontologies that we have
considered in Section 2. In the next paragraphs, we have summarised them in the most
faithful way. The interested reader should go to the source, always cited, in order to
have a complete picture of the conclusions reached by the comparisons’ authors. The
last paragraph, instead, provides a synthesis of the description we have given in Section
2.

Pease’s comparison of DOLCE and SUMO. In [15] and [16], Pease draws a comparison
between DOLCE and SUMO. His conclusions are that DOLCE has a similar purpose
and business process to SUMO in that it is a free research project for use in both natural
language tasks and inference. DOLCE has been carefully crafted with respect to strong
principles. DOLCE is an “ontology of particulars”; it does have universals (classes and
properties), but the claim is that they are only employed in the service of describing
particulars. In contrast, SUMO could be described as an ontology of both particulars
and universals. It has a hierarchy of properties as well as classes. This is a very im-
portant feature for practical knowledge engineering, as it allows common features like
transitivity to be applied to a set of properties, with an axiom that is written once and
inherited by those properties, rather than having to be rewritten, specific to each prop-
erty. Other differences include DOLCE’s use of a set of meta-properties as a guiding
methodology, as opposed to SUMO’s use and formal definition of such meta-properties
directly in the ontology itself. With respect to SUMO, DOLCE does not include such
items as a hierarchy of process types, physical objects, organisms, units and measures,
and event roles.

Onto-Med’s comparison of GFO, DOLCE, and Sowa’s ontology. In [10], informal

mappings from GFO to DOLCE and from GFO to Sowa’s ontology, and viceversa,
are specified. The authors of the comparison observe that all of Sowa’s categories ex-
cept for three can be reinterpreted in GFO. However, mapping in the opposite direc-
tion seems to be more problematic. For many of GFO categories, the corresponding
notions in Sowa’s ontology has not been found. Neither a space-time model nor a prop-
erty model is included in Sowa’s ontology, and the construction method of GFO is not
as strictly combinatorial as is Sowa’s ontology. In DOLCE, levels of reality are not
introduced explicitly, while in GFO the authors explicitly distinguish three levels of
reality. Universals are excluded from DOLCE, which supports neither the distinctions
provided in GFO concerning sets and items, nor concerning the typology of categories.
A time or a space model is not built directly into DOLCE. Instead, the representation
of various models of space and time is permitted, which can be introduced by means
of qualities and their associated “qualia” (the latter are similar to GFO’s quality val-
ues). In the GFO, spatial location is modelled in terms of spatial regions and relations,
like occupation and location; temporal location is based on time regions and projec-
tion relations. In addition, presently the GFO provides a model for time and space. The
DOLCE distinction between endurant and perdurant is based on the behavior of enti-
ties in time. Endurants are entities that can change in time, are wholly present at any
time of their existence, and have no temporal parts but their parts are time-indexed, and
participate in perdurants. GFO distinguishes between persistence through time and be-
ing wholly present at a time-boundary. This has produced two GFO categories instead
of endurant alone: persistants and presentials. GFO persistant refers to the idea of per-
sistence through time as attributed to DOLCE’s endurant, although persistants are not
considered in GFO as individuals but as universals1 . GFO presentials can be generally
interpreted as DOLCE endurants, but without temporal extension. Intuitively, DOLCE
notion of perdurant corresponds to GFO notion of occurrent. Moreover, it seems that
the GFO notions of process, state and change can be interpreted in DOLCE as stative,
state and event, respectively. Finally, the GFO categories that concern properties and
their values correspond rather well to DOLCE qualities, qualia and quality spaces.

MITRE’s comparison of SUMO, Upper Cyc, and DOLCE. In [18], Semy, Pulvermacher
and Obrst compare SUMO, Upper Cyc, and DOLCE according to the existence of an
open license, modularity and evidence of use. We have adopted these criteria inside our
analysis, which thus subsumes Semy, Pulvermacher and Obrst’s one.

1
The forthcoming release of GFO, expected by early 2007, will include some refinements of
the notion of persistence which will make this statement no longer valid.
Grenon’s comparison of DOLCE and BFO. Grenon made a careful comparison be-
tween DOLCE and BFO [7]. The conclusion is that both ontologies contain a category
of endurants and perdurants and an eternalist stance, and that the theory of parthood and
the theory of dependence are similar in the two ontologies. Despite these similarities,
there are also many differences, including:
– DOLCE is methodologically fundamentally conceptualist while BFO is method-
ologically fundamentally realist;
– DOLCE seems to be oriented toward commonsense, and BFO’s naïve realism is
in the same spirit. However, DOLCE distinguishes between abstract and concrete
entities, and it includes agents and intentionality. BFO is deliberately not committed
to these distinctions. In particular, the physical / non-physical endurants distinction
in DOLCE is absent in BFO.
– As already mentioned, DOLCE is intended as an ontology of particulars. BFO is
intended to be an ontology of both universals and particulars.
– In DOLCE, qualities are abstract entities which may not be found in space or time,
and do not have parts. For BFO, the proxies of DOLCE’s qualities (“tropes”) are
located in space and exist at a time in the very same way that the entities in which
they inhere.
Another source of information about the similarities and differences between DOLCE
and BFO is [12], where Masolo, Borgo, Gangemi, Guarino, and Oltramari of the Lab-
oratory For Applied Ontology (LOA) compare DOLCE and BFO (besides the OCHRE
object-centered ontology, [17], that we did not consider in our analysis) by representing
the assertion “A statute of clay exists for a period of time going from t1 to t2 . Between
t2 and t3 , the statue is crashed and so ceases to exists although the clay is still there.” in
both of them.

Other existing sources of comparison. Evaluations of three Candidate Common Upper

Ontologies, including SUMO and MSO, can be found at http://suo.ieee.org/
SUO/Evaluations/. The criteria considered there include maturity, robustness, poten-
tial for broad acceptance, language flexibility, ownership/cost, and domain friendliness.
These evaluations are not comparative: each Upper Ontology is evaluated (usually, by
its creator) according to the above metrics.

Our comparison. The description of the 7 Upper Ontologies given in Section 2 is syn-
thesised here in Tables 1 and 2.

Acknowledgments
We want to acknowledge all the researchers that helped in drawing this comparison
with their constructive comments and useful advices. In particular, many thanks go to J.
Euzenat, A. Kiryakov, L. Lefkowitz, F. Loebe, A. Pease, J. Schoening, P. Shvaiko, and
H. Stenzhorn.
We also acknowledge the research projects TIN2006-15265-C06-04 and “Iniziativa
Software” CINI-FINMECCANICA that partially funded this work.
 Home page Developers Dimensions Language(s)
http://www. Smith, Grenon,
36 classes related via the
BFO ifomis.org/ Stenzhorn, Spear OWL
is_a relation
bfo (IFOMIS)
About 300,000 concepts,
3,000,000 assertions (facts
http://www.
Cyc Cycorp and rules), 15,000 relations CycL, OWL
cyc.com/
(these numbers include mi-
crotheories)
http://www. Guarino and other First Order
About 100 concepts and
DOLCE loa-cnr.it/ researchers of the Logic, KIF,
100 axioms
DOLCE.html LOA OWL
First Order
http://www.
Logic and
onto-med.de/ The Onto-Med Re- 79 classes, 97 subclass-
GFO KIF (forth-
ontologies/ search Group relations, 67 properties
coming);
gfo.html
OWL
http:
//proton. 300 concepts and 100
PROTON Ontotext Lab, Sirma OWL Lite
semanticweb. properties
org/
First Or-
http://www.
30 classes, 5 relationships, der Modal
Sowa’s jfsowa.com/ Sowa
30 axioms Language,
ontology/
KIF
http://www. 20,000 terms and 60,000
Niles, Pease, and SUO-KIF,
SUMO ontologyportal. axioms (including domain
Menzel OWL
org/ ontologies)

Table 1. Comparison, Part I

 Alignment with
Modularity Applications Licensing
WordNet
SNAP and
Mainly in the biomedical do-
BFO SPAN mod- Not supported Freely available
main
ules
Commercial prod-
uct; ResearchCyc
and OpenCyc
Natural language processing, Cyc is mapped
“Microtheory” are instead freely
Cyc network risk assessment, ter- to about 12,000
modules available (Re-
rorism management WordNet synsets
searchCyc for
research purposes
only)
DOLCE-Lite-Plus
Multilingual information re-
Not divided has been aligned
DOLCE trieval, web-based systems Freely available
into modules with about 100
and services, e-learning
Wordnet sysnsets
Abstract
top level, Released under the
Mainly in the biomedical do-
GFO abstract core Not supported modified BSD Li-
main
level, basic cence
level
Semantic annotation within
the KIM platform, knowl-
edge management systems
Three levels in legal and telecommunica-
PROTON including tions domain, media research Not supported Freely available
four modules and analysis, research intelli-
gence, Business Data Ontol-
ogy for Semantic Web Ser-
vices.
No documented applications
have been developed, but
Not divided
Sowa’s Sowa’s ontology inspired Not supported Freely available
into modules
the creation of many imple-
mented Upper Ontologies
Divided
SUMO has been
into SUMO
Linguistics, representation, mapped to all of
SUMO itself, MILO, Freely available
reasoning Wordnet v2.1 by
and domain
hand
ontologies

Table 2. Comparison, Part II

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