A survey on fuzzy ontologies for the Semantic Web

Abstract

Ontology, as a standard (World Wide Web Consortium recommendation) for representing knowledge in the Semantic Web, has become a fundamental and critical component for developing applications in different real-world scenarios. However, it is widely pointed out that classical ontology model is not sufficient to deal with imprecise and vague knowledge strongly characterizing some real-world applications. Thus, a requirement of extending ontologies naturally arises in many practical applications of knowledge-based systems, in particular the Semantic Web. In order to provide the necessary means to handle such vague and imprecise information there are today many proposals for fuzzy extensions to ontologies, and until now the literature on fuzzy ontologies has been flourishing. To investigate fuzzy ontologies and more importantly serve as helping readers grasp the main ideas and results of fuzzy ontologies, and to highlight an ongoing research on fuzzy approaches for knowledge semantic representation based on ontologies, as well as their applications on various domains, in this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of fuzzy ontologies. In detail, we first introduce fuzzy ontologies from the most common aspects such as representation (including categories, formal definitions, representation languages, and tools of fuzzy ontologies), reasoning (including reasoning techniques and reasoners), and applications (the most relevant applications about fuzzy ontologies). Then, the other important issues on fuzzy ontologies, such as construction, mapping, integration, query, storage, evaluation, extension, and directions for future research, are also discussed in detail. Also, we make some comparisons and analyses in our whole review.ontology definition languages, such as RDF(S), SHOE, OIL, DAML, DAML + OIL, and web ontology language (OWL), have been developed over the past years (Horrocks et al., 2003). The OWL (Smith et al., 2004) and its successor OWL 2 (Cuenca Grau et al., 2008) is the W3C recommended ontology representation language. The theoretical underpinnings of OWL and ontologies are strongly based on Description Logics (DLs), a subset of first-order logic especially suitable for representing structured knowledge (Horrocks & Sattler, 2001;Baader et al., 2003;Horrocks et al., 2003).Although ontology is a quite expressive formalism, it features limitations, mainly with what can be said about fuzzy information. Nowadays, in ontology-based and many applications information is often vague and imprecise. This is a well-known problem especially for semantics-based applications of the Semantic Web, such as knowledge management, e-commerce, and web portals. For example, a task like a 'doctor appointment' could look like: 'Make me an appointment with a doctor close to my home not too early and of good references' (Stoilos et al., 2010). The conceptual formalism supported by typical ontology may not be sufficient to represent such information and knowledge. Therefore, many proposals have attempted to apply different formalisms...

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