Fuzzy semantic distance measures between ontological concepts

Abstract

An emphasis has been placed on the use of ontologies for representing application domain knowledge. Determining a degree or measure of semantic similarity, semantic distance, or semantic relatedness between concepts from different systems or domains, is becoming an increasingly important task. This paper presents a brief overview of such measures between concepts within ontological representations and provides several examples of such measures found in the research literature. These measures are then examined within the framework of fuzzy set similarity measures. The use of a semantic similarity measure between elements that are part of a domain for which an ontological structure exists is explored in order to extend standard fuzzy set compatibility measures.