Towards a Dempster–Shafer Fuzzy Description Logic—Handling Imprecision in the Semantic Web

Abstract

Vague information has been emerged as a main issue in Semantic Web community. Vagueness is traditionally represented by fuzzy set theory. Besides vagueness, Semantic Web queries often have to deal with information incompleteness, aka uncertainty. This kind of information can be represented through Dempster–Shafer theory, that also enables distributed information fusion. Vagueness along with information incompleteness are often referred to under the common term imprecise information . Imprecise information should be represented and manipulated under a common framework. We propose such a framework by defining a fuzzy Description Logic extended with Dempster–Shafer theory. Furthermore, we regard our method as a DL extension and we implemented it by a metaontology that captures Dempster–Shafer Fuzzy statements.