Vagueness in Description Logics for the Semantic Web

Ontologies play a crucial role in the development of the Semantic Web as a means for defining shared terms in Web resources. They are formulated in web ontology languages, which are based on expressive description logics. Significant research efforts are recently directed towards representing and reasoning with uncertainty and vagueness in ontologies for the Semantic Web. In this paper, we give an overview of probabilistic uncertainty, possibilistic uncertainty, and vagueness in expressive description logics for the Semantic Web. 1Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Via Salaria 113, I-00198 Rome, Italy; e-mail: [email protected]. Institut für Informationssysteme, Technische Universität Wien, Favoritenstraße 9-11, A-1040 Vienna, Austria; e-mail: [email protected]. 2ISTI-CNR, Via G. Moruzzi 1, I-56124 Pisa, Italy; e-mail: [email protected]. Acknowledgements: This work has been partially supported by a Heisenberg Professorship of the German Research Foundation (DFG). Copyright c © 2006 by the authors INFSYS RR 1843-06-07 I