Multi-Viewpoints Ontological Knowledge Representation: A Fuzzy Description Logics Based Approach

Abstract

Description Logics (DLs) play a key role in the design of ontologies. An ontology is a formal description of important concepts in a particular domain. In practice, a set of a specific-domain applications use different representations of the same real world entity due to various viewpoints, context, and specific interest. In this paper, we are interested in the problem of representing an ontology in a heterogeneous domain by taking into consideration different viewpoints and different terminologies of various users, groups or even communities in the organisation. This type of ontology, called multi-viewpoints ontology, confers to the same universe of discourse, several partial descriptions, where each one is relative to a particular viewpoint. Moreover, these partial descriptions share at global level, fuzzy ontological elements allowing the representation of vague/imprecise knowledge between the various viewpoints. So, our goal is to propose a fuzzy multi-viewpoints ontology Web language, which is an extension of OWL-DL language, to allow the multi-viewpoints ontologies representation.