Latest research on formal methods for knowledge representation based on semantic web technologies witnessed how ontologies have become a fundamental and critical component for developing applications in different real world scenarios. Indeed, ontologies formally model application domains to enable reuse of knowledge and allow people and software agents to share a common understanding of the str...

This article critiques the Fuzzy-set Qualitative Analysis (fs/QCA) methodology by examining its applicability in three studies in the field of comparative social policy. In each of these three test cases, I focus on the validity of fuzzy-set’s claimed function – its ability to combine theoretic discourse and evidence analysis. All three studies investigate welfare state reform in the late twent...

This study addresses concepts and representation of beach nourishment by two spatial ontologies and one spatio-temporal ontology. We extend a spatial ontology based on crisp objects to one with fuzzy objects, to which temporal aspects are added. The fuzzy ontologies are described using semantic membership functions. The three ontologies are applied to a case study on beach nourishments at the I...

Ontologies have succeeded as a knowledge representation formalism in many domains of application. Nevertheless, they are not suitable to represent vague or imprecise information. To overcome this limitation, several extensions to classical ontologies based on fuzzy logic have been proposed. Even though different fuzzy logics lead to fuzzy ontologies with very different logical properties, the c...

OWL ontologies are nowadays a quite popular way to describe structured knowledge in terms of classes, relations among classes and class instances. In this paper, given an ontology target T, we address the problem learning fuzzy concept inclusion axioms that sufficient conditions for being individual instance T (and which degree). To do so, present Fuzzy OWL-Boost relies on Real AdaBoost boostin...