Entities The main characteristic of abstract entities is that they do not have spatial or temporal qualities, and they are not qualities themselves. The only class of abstract entities we consider in the current version of DOLCE is that of quality regions (or simply regions). Quality spaces are special kinds of quality regions, acting as mereological sums of all the regions related to a certain...

Membrane processes, whose low energy and operating costs make them competitive for gas separation compared to other conventional methods such as pressure swing adsorption, cryogenic distillation or amine absorption, allows high-purity be obtained in a sustainable continuous manner. Similarly, resin-derived carbon membranes with molecular sieving properties have improved the selectivity permeabi...

The escalating level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is one of the most pressing environmental concerns of our age. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) from large point sources such as power plants is one option for reducing anthropogenic CO(2) emissions; however, currently the capture alone will increase the energy requirements of a plant by 25-40%. This Review highlights the challenges for capture...

D-Xylitol is found in low content as a natural constituent of many fruits and vegetables. It is a five-carbon sugar polyol and has been used as a food additive and sweetening agent to replace sucrose, especially for non-insulin dependent diabetics. It has multiple beneficial health effects, such as the prevention of dental caries, and acute otitis media. In industry, it has been produced by che...

Hydrocarbons are sparingly soluble in aqueous solvents and to a first approximation their solubility can be described by the traditional Henry’s Law, which linearly relates the mole fraction in water to gas-phase partial pressure. The presence of amines in the aqueous phase increases hydrocarbon solubility over that in water, an effect referred to as “salting-in”. Commercial amine treating solu...

In this paper we introduce the DOLCE upper level ontology, the first module of a Foundational Ontologies Library being developed within the WonderWeb project. DOLCE is presented here in an intuitive way; the reader should refer to the project deliverable for a detailed axiomatization. A comparison with WordNet's top-level taxonomy of nouns is also provided, which shows how DOLCE, used in additi...

By applying the Corpus Pattern Analysis procedure (CPA, Hanks 2004) to the analysis of concordances for ca 1000 English, Italian and Spanish verbs conducted with the aim of acquiring their most recurrent patterns, intended as corpus-derived argument structures with specification of the expected semantic type for each argument position (i.e. [[Human]] attends [[Event]]), we compiled a list of ab...