Modeling Uncertainty in Ontologies using Rough Set

Abstract

Modeling the uncertain aspect of the world in ontologies is attracting a lot of interests to ontologies builders especially in the World Wide Web community. This paper defines a way of handling uncertainty in description logic ontologies without remodeling existing ontologies or altering the syntax of existing ontologies modeling languages. We show that the source of vagueness in an ontology is from vague attributes and vague roles. Therefore, to have a clear separation between crisp concepts and vague concepts, the set of roles R is split into two distinct sets and representing the set of crisp roles and the set of vague roles respectively. Similarly, the set of attributes A was split into two distinct sets and representing the set of crisp attributes and the set of vague attributes respectively. Concepts are therefore clearly classified as crisp concepts or vague concepts depending on whether vague attributes or vague roles are used in its conceptualization or not. The concept of rough set introduced by Pawlak is used to measure the degree of satisfiability of vague concepts as well as vague roles. In this approach, the cost of reengineering existing ontologies in order to cope with reasoning over the uncertain aspects of the world is minimal.