DOLCE ExtendedDnS OWL Module (Descriptions and Situations)

Local reference identifier: xwkont:ref:dolce-extendeddns-owl Slug: dolce-extendeddns-owl Editorial status: candidate Created: 2026-07-05 Modified: 2026-07-05

Descriptive Metadata

Field	Value	Notes
Title	ExtendedDnS (Descriptions and Situations, with an extended vocabulary for social reification)	Per the ontology's own rdfs:comment: "The DnS (Descriptions and Situation) ontology, with an extended vocabulary for social reification."
Creator	Aldo Gangemi (OWL engineering)	Same attribution pattern as xwkont:ref:dolce-lite-owl; DnS theory itself originates in Gangemi & Mika (2003) and related DOLCE-driven literature, not independently verified in this pass.
Contributor	unknown
Publisher	Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA-CNR)	Canonical namespace: http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/ExtendedDnS.owl#. owl:imports DOLCE-Lite.owl, TemporalRelations.owl, SpatialRelations.owl.
Source type	OWL ontology (machine-readable, not a paper)
Version or edition	version 397 (per the file's own owl:versionInfo, matching xwkont:ref:dolce-lite-owl's version), fetched via the same GitHub mirror (iddi/sofia) used for xwkont:ref:dolce-lite-owl since the canonical loa-cnr.it host did not serve the raw file directly in this pass
Identifier or URL	Canonical: http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/ExtendedDnS.owl; fetched from: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/iddi/sofia/master/eu.sofia.adk.common/ontologies/foundational/ExtendedDnS.owl
Access date	2026-07-05
Snapshot / Stable identifier	No Wayback Machine snapshot found for the raw file itself (wayback/available returned no result); repository-level snapshot http://web.archive.org/web/20200919223520/https://github.com/iddi/sofia (2020-09-19) used as fallback, consistent with xwkont:ref:gfo's precedent for GitHub-hosted OWL sources without a file-specific snapshot.
Rights/license	unknown	Not verified in this pass.

Source Relation Notes

Extends xwkont:ref:dolce-lite-owl (core DOLCE-Lite) with the DnS (Descriptions and Situations) module — the formal treatment of situation, description, concept, figure, and related social-reification vocabulary that core DOLCE-Lite.owl explicitly declines to formalize (see that class's own comment, quoted in docs/crosswalks/concepts/situation-state-of-affairs.md's note-001). Fetched specifically to resolve that crosswalk's uncertainty-002.

Rights and License Notes

Not verified in this pass. Treat as unknown rather than guessed.

Citation and Locator Notes

Recommended citation: ExtendedDnS (Descriptions and Situations). Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA-CNR). http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/ExtendedDnS.owl. OWL engineering by Aldo Gangemi.

Direct primary-source verification (2026-07-05): fetched directly as plain-text OWL/XML and read to resolve docs/crosswalks/concepts/situation-state-of-affairs.md's uncertainty-002 (whether DOLCE's separate DnS module contains a formal situation class beyond core DOLCE-Lite's informal commentary). Confirmed a fully defined #situation class:

• owl:equivalentClass of the intersection of non-agentive-social-object, setting-for some particular (DOLCE-Lite), and satisfies some description.
• owl:disjointWith collection, concept, non-agentive-figure, information-object, figure, description.
• rdfs:comment: "A situation is a social object that appears in the domain of an ontology only because there is a description whose components can 'carve up' a view (setting) on that domain. A situation has to satisfy a description..., and it has to be setting for at least one entity. In other words, it is the ontological counterpart (with due local differences or restrictions) of settings (situations from SC, contexts, episodes, states of affairs, structures, configurations, cases, etc.). A perdurant is usually the only mandatory constituent of a setting."

This confirms DOLCE — via its DnS extension, not core DOLCE-Lite — does have a formally defined class matching the "situation"/"state of affairs" sense, materially changing situation-state-of-affairs.md's cross-source evidence count from uncertainty-001's "1 of 8 sources." Used in situation-state-of-affairs.md.