Description logic–based knowledge merging for concrete- and fuzzy-domain ontologies

Abstract

Enterprises, especially virtual enterprises, are nowadays becoming more knowledge intensive and adopting efficient knowledge management systems to boost their competitiveness. The major challenge for knowledge management for virtual enterprises is to acquire, extract and integrate new knowledge with the existing source. Ontologies have been proved to be one of the best tools for representing knowledge with class, role and other characteristics. It is imperative to accommodate the new knowledge in the current ontologies with logical consistencies as it is tedious and costly to construct new ontologies every time after acquiring new knowledge. This article introduces a mechanism and a process to integrate new knowledge into the current system (ontology). Separate methods have been adopted for fuzzy- and concrete-domain ontologies. The process starts by finding the semantic and structural similarities between the concepts using WordNet and description logic. Description logic–based reasoning is used next to determine the position and relationships between the incoming and existing knowledge. The experimental results provided show the efficacy of the proposed method.