Characterizing IOF terms with the DOLCE and UFO ontologies

This paper is an ontological analysis exercise aiming, first of all, at clarifying the intended semantic of a number of general terms used in the manufacturing domain, selected by the Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) initiative. In addition, we show how the DOLCE foundational ontology is well-suited as main reference framework for this task, integrated (in a few specific cases) with more recent work done in the framework of UFO. For each term, we propose a DOLCE-based (first-order) axiomatization together with examples and counter-examples. In several cases, some new primitives are introduced in addition to those used in DOLCE.