We propose a view of vagueness as a semantic property of names and predicates. All entities are crisp, on this semantic view, but there are, for each vague name, multiple portions of reality that are equally good candidates for being its referent, and, for each vague predicate, multiple classes of objects that are equally good candidates for being its extension. We provide a new formulation of ...

Vagueness is often considered as an inherent property of spatiotemporal phenomena. In order to reduce this vagueness, integrity constraints should be defined to improve logical consistency of spatiotemporal databases. However, existing constraints are not adapted to control logical consistency of vague spatiotemporal objects because they are initially defined for crisp (or non–fuzzy) objects. W...

Managing uncertainty and/or vagueness is starting to play an important role in Semantic Web representation languages. Our aim is to overview basic concepts on representing uncertain and vague knowledge in current Semantic Web ontology and rule languages (and their combination).

The mass/count distinction attracts a lot of attention among cognitive scientists, possibly because it involves in fundamental ways the relation between language (i.e. grammar), thought (i.e. extralinguistic conceptual systems) and reality (i.e. the physical world). In the present paper, I explore the view that the mass/count distinction is a matter of vagueness. While every noun/concept may in...

The need to deal with vague information in Semantic Web languages is rising in importance and, thus, calls for a standard way to represent such information. We may address this issue by either extending current Semantic Web languages to cope with vagueness, or by providing an ontology describing how to represent such information within Semantic Web languages. In this work, we follow the latter ...

We describe the ongoing construction of a large, semantically annotated corpus resource as reliable basis for the largescale acquisition of word-semantic information, e.g. the construction of domainindependent lexica. The backbone of the annotation are semantic roles in the frame semantics paradigm. We report experiences and evaluate the annotated data from the first project stage. On this basi...

Both in dealing with the semantic paradoxes and in dealing with vagueness and indeterminacy, there is some temptation to weaken classical logic: in particular, to restrict the law of excluded middle. The reasons for doing this are somewhat different in the two cases. In the case of the semantic paradoxes, a weakening of classical logic (presumably involving a restriction of excluded middle) is ...

It has long been recognized that pronominal clitics in Greek show a progression over time away from the fairly strict adherence to Wackernagel’s position found in Homeric Greek (8th century BC). Indeed, Wackernagel himself comments on this fact (Wackernagel 1892). It is not at all clear, however, how to characterize the post-Homeric situation. Past attempts to address this question (e.g., Dover...

This chapter explores the phenomenon of vagueness as it relates to spatial information. It will be seen that many semantic subtleties and representational difficulties arise when spatial information is affected by vagueness. Moreover, since vagueness is particularly pervasive in spatial terminology, these problems have a significant bearing on the development of computational systems to provide...

This paper is directed towards an infrastructure for handling both uncertainty and vagueness in the Rules, Logic, and Proof layers of the Semantic Web. More concretely, we present probabilistic fuzzy description logic programs, which combine fuzzy description logics, fuzzy logic programs (with stratified nonmonotonic negation), and probabilistic uncertainty in a uniform framework for the Semant...