Empirical Merging of Ontologies A Proposal of Universal Uncertainty Representation Framework

ontology, uncertainty

The significance of uncertainty representation has become obvious in the Semantic Web community recently. This paper presents our research on uncertainty handling in automatically created ontologies. A new framework for uncertain information processing is proposed. The research is related to OLE (Ontology LEarning) - a project aimed at bottomup generation and merging of domain-specific ontologies. Formal systems that underlie the uncertainty representation are briefly introduced. We discuss the universal internal format of uncertain conceptual structures in OLE then and offer a utilisation example then. The proposed format serves as a basis for empirical improvement of initial knowledge acquisition methods as well as for general explicit inference tasks.