Ontology design with a granular approach

•We present a granular view on ontology that: the ontology is granular.•The ontology is a granular approximation of the conceptualization.•The conceptual relation granules are ordered tuples.•We also present a granular ontology design approach.

Ontology design for complex applications is quite a challenge. The quality of an ontology is highly dependent upon the capabilities of designers, and the collaborative design process is hampered by the difficulty of balancing the viewpoints of different designers. In this paper, we present a granular view of ontology: ontologies are granular, ontologies are granular approximations of conceptualizations and conceptual-relation granules of an ontology are ordered tuples. We then propose a corresponding granular ontology design approach. In our granular ontology design approach, the unified granular cognition level and hierarchies of sub-concepts are initialized before ontological terms are designed in detail, which reduces the subjective effects of the capabilities of designers. Our approach also introduces the idea of optimization to choose an optimal subset, which can best approximate the real concept domain, from the knowledge rule set presented by different domain experts. The optimal subset is chosen on the basis of the principle of granular ontology knowledge structure.