This paper addresses a major weakness of current technologies for the Semantic Web, namely the lack of a principled means to represent and reason about uncertainty. This not only hinders the realization of the original vision for the Semantic Web, but also creates a barrier to the development of new, powerful features for general knowledge applications that require proper treatment of uncertain phenomena. We propose to extend OWL, the ontology language recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), to provide the ability to express probabilistic knowledge. The new language, PROWL , will allow legacy ontologies to interoperate with newly developed probabilistic ontologies. PROWL will move beyond the current limitations of deterministic classical logic to a full first-order probabilistic logic. By providing a principled means of modeling uncertainty in ontologies, PROWL will serve as a supporting tool for many applications that can benefit from probabilistic inference within an ontology language, thus representing an important step toward the W3C's vision for the Semantic Web.
Abstract. The past few years have witnessed an increasingly mature body of research on the Semantic Web, with new standards being developed and more complex use cases being proposed and explored. As complexity increases in SW applications, so does the need for principled means to cope with uncertainty inherent to real world SW applications. Not surprisingly, several approaches addressing uncertainty representation and reasoning on the Semantic Web have emerged [3,4,6,7,10,11,13,14]. For example, PR-OWL [3] provides OWL constructs for representing Multi-Entity Bayesian Network (MEBN) [8] theories. This paper reviews some shortcomings of PR-OWL 1 [2] and describes how they will be addressed in PR-OWL 2. A method is presented for mapping back and forth from triples into random variables (RV). The method applies to triples representing both predicates and functions. A complex example is given for mapping an n-ary relation using the proposed schematic.
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