Fuzzy ontology models based on fuzzy linguistic variable for knowledge management and information retrieval

Abstract

Ontology is the basis of sharing and reusing knowledge on the Semantic Web, and ontology-based semantic retrieval is a hotspot of current research. Fuzzy ontology is an extension of domain ontology for solving the uncertainty problems. To represent fuzzy knowledge more effectively, this paper presents a new series of fuzzy ontology models that consists of fuzzy domain ontology and fuzzy linguistic variable ontologies, considering semantic relationships of concepts, including set relation, order relation, equivalence relation and semantic association relation etc. The process to construct linguistic variables ontology is discussed. Using ontology and RDFS, the knowledge model for product information is created. To achieve semantic retrieval, the semantic query expansion in SeRQL is constructed by semantic relations between fuzzy concepts. The application shows that these models can overcome the localization of other fuzzy ontology models, and this research facilitates the fuzzy knowledge sharing and semantic retrieval on the Semantic Web. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.