Interoperability among distributed overlapping ontologies - A fuzzy ontology framework

Ontologies are proposed as a means for knowledge sharing among applications but, it is often not possible to converge to a single unambiguous ontology that is acceptable to all knowledge engineers. Different ontologies vary greatly in terms of the level of detail of their representations, as well as the nature of their underlying logical specifications. Interoperability among different ontologies becomes essential to gain from the power of the existing domain ontologies. In this paper we have proposed a fuzzy ontology framework in which a concept descriptor is represented as a fuzzy relation which encodes the degree of a property value using a fuzzy membership function. Other than concept descriptors, the semantic relations in the ontology like IS-A, IUS-PART etc. are also associated a strength of association. The strength of association between two concepts determines the "uniformity" with which these two concepts have been defined identically across different ontologies. The fuzzy ontology framework provides appropriate support for application integration by identifying the most likely location of a particular term in the ontology.