An extension of the ontology web language with multi-viewpoints and probabilistic reasoning

Abstract

A real world entity is unique, but it can have several representations due to various interests or perspectives. In this paper, we are interested in the problem of multi-representation in ontology. We believe that the most appropriate way is to use viewpoint notion in order to build an ontology called multi-viewpoints ontology. This type of 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, probabilistic ontological elements allowing the representation of uncertain knowledge between the various viewpoints. The treatment of this kind of information requires new approaches for knowledge representation and reasoning on the web as existing semantic web languages are based on classical logic which is known to be inadequate for representing uncertainty. So, our goal is to propose an ontology web language, which extend OWL language with viewpoint and probabilistic uncertainty, to allow multi-viewpoints and probabilistic reasoning with OWL ontologies.