A Reference Architecture for Probabilistic Ontology Development

The use of ontologies is on the rise, as they facilitate interoperability and provide support for automation. Today, ontologies are popular for research in areas such as the Semantic Web, knowledge engineering, artificial intelligence and knowledge management. However, many real world problems in these disciplines are burdened by incomplete information and other sources of uncertainty which traditional ontologies cannot represent. Therefore, a means to incorporate uncertainty is a necessity. Probabilistic ontologies extend current ontology formalisms to provide support for representing and reasoning with uncertainty. Representation of uncertainty in real-world problems requires probabilistic ontologies, which integrate the inferential reasoning power of probabilistic representations with the first-order expressivity of ontologies. This paper introduces a systematic approach to probabilistic ontology development through a reference architecture which captures the evolution of a traditional ontology into a probabilistic ontology implementation for real-world problems. The Reference Architecture for Probabilistic Ontology Development catalogues and defines the processes and artifacts necessary for the development, implementation and evaluation of explicit, logical and defensible probabilistic ontologies developed for knowledgesharing and reuse in a given domain. Keywords—probabilistic ontology, knowledge engineering, reference architecture