Generating ontologies from relational data with fuzzy-syllogistic reasoning

Abstract

Existing standards for crisp description logics facilitate information exchange between systems that reason with crisp ontologies. Applications with probabilistic or possibilistic extensions of ontologies and reasoners promise to capture more information, because they can deal with more uncertainties or vagueness of information. However, since there are no standards for either extension, information exchange between such applications is not generic. Fuzzy-syllogistic reasoning with the fuzzy-syllogistic system4S provides 2048 possible fuzzy inference schema for every possible triple concept relationship of an ontology. Since the inference schema are the result of all possible set-theoretic relationships between three sets with three out of 8 possible fuzzy-quantifiers, the whole set of 2048 possible fuzzy inferences can be used as one generic fuzzy reasoner for quantified ontologies. In that sense, a fuzzy syllogistic reasoner can be employed as a generic reasoner that combines possibilistic inferencing with probabilistic ontologies, thus facilitating knowledge exchange between ontology applications of different domains as well as information fusion over them.