Multi-viewpoint ontologies for decision-making support

Abstract

Considering multiple viewpoints is often required when building ontologies for decision-making support systems. The notion of subjective context is useful for designing such a systems. We review the evolution of the subjectivity representation in the knowledge engineering, then choose an appropriate definition of the context for our application. This allows formulating the functional requirements for a multi-viewpoint decision-making support system and choosing the technical way of context representation. We propose a method of ontological representation of multiple viewpoints using named graphs as a response to these requirements. Decision-making support in the socio-economic realms is an especially valuable application for multi-viewpoint ontologies. We consider a demonstration use case, including software implementation. The inference rules may be used in such applications both for making conclusions within every particular context, or transferring knowledge between them. We present a set of sample rules for our demonstration use case and discuss the results achieved.