Reasoning and change management in modular fuzzy ontologies

The growing emphasis on complexity concerns for ontologies has attracted significant interest from both the researcher’s and the practitioner’s communities in modularization techniques as a way to decrease the complexity of managing huge ontologies. On the other hand, it has been widely pointed out that classical ontologies are not appropriate to deal with imprecise and vague knowledge, which is inherent to several real world domains. In order to handle these types of knowledge, some fuzzy extensions of classical ontologies are presented, yielding fuzzy ontologies. In this paper, we integrate modular ontologies with fuzzy ontologies, i.e., the notion of modular fuzzy ontologies is presented. Furthermore, we present an infrastructure for the representation of and reasoning with modular fuzzy ontologies based on distributed fuzzy description logics.

► This paper introduces a representational framework for modular fuzzy ontologies that builds on top of distributed fuzzy description logics as a framework for reasoning about distributed fuzzy ontologies. ► We define reasoning mechanisms for modular fuzzy ontologies as a special case of general inference in distributed fuzzy description logics. ► We discusses the problem of handling changes in external fuzzy ontologies, moreover, we describe a method for detecting changes in a fuzzy ontology and for assessing their impact.