Fuzzy spatio‐temporal ontologies and formal construction based on fuzzy Petri nets

Abstract

AbstractFuzzy spatio‐temporal knowledge is required in a wide range of application fields, including GIS, spatio‐temporal database, and artificial intelligence. Ontology, as a formal method of knowledge representation, plays a key role in the Semantic Web. Therefore, how to extend ontologies to represent fuzzy spatio‐temporal knowledge needs to be solved. In this paper, we propose an approach for representing fuzzy spatio‐temporal knowledge with ontologies and investigate a formal construction of fuzzy spatio‐temporal ontologies based on fuzzy Petri nets. First, we propose a formal definition of fuzzy spatio‐temporal ontologies. In addition, based on fuzzy description logic, a description logic named the fuzzy spatio‐temporal description logic, which provides a logical basis for the fuzzy spatio‐temporal ontologies, is presented. Furthermore, a fuzzy spatio‐temporal web ontology language, which is fuzzy and spatio‐temporal extension of standard ontology language OWL, is proposed to make the fuzzy spatio‐temporal ontologies easy to use and support efficient reasoning. On the basis of fuzzy spatio‐temporal ontologies, we investigate a formal approach for constructing fuzzy spatio‐temporal ontologies from fuzzy spatio‐temporal Petri nets, ie, transforming fuzzy spatio‐temporal Petri nets (including Petri net model and Petri net instance) into fuzzy spatio‐temporal ontologies at both structure and instance levels. Finally, we prove the correctness of the transformation and provide a detailed transformation example.