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BOWL: augmenting the Semantic Web with beliefs

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Abstract

As the Semantic Web is an open, complex and constantly evolving medium, it is the norm, but not exception that information at different sites is incomplete or inconsistent. This poses challenges for the engineering and development of agent systems on the Semantic Web, since autonomous software agents need to understand, process and aggregate this information. Ontology language OWL provides core language constructs to semantically markup resources on the Semantic Web, on which software agents interact and cooperate to accomplish complex tasks. However, as OWL was designed on top of (a subset of) classic predicate logic, it lacks the ability to reason about inconsistent or incomplete information. Belief-augmented Frames (BAF) is a frame-based logic system that associates with each frame a supporting and a refuting belief value. In this paper, we propose a new ontology language Belief-augmented OWL (BOWL) by integrating OWL DL and BAF to incorporate the notion of confidence. BOWL is paraconsistent, hence it can perform useful reasoning services in the presence of inconsistencies and incompleteness. We define the abstract syntax and semantics of BOWL by extending those of OWL. We have proposed reasoning algorithms for various reasoning tasks in the BOWL framework and we have implemented the algorithms using the constraint logic programming framework. One example in the sensor fusion domain is presented to demonstrate the application of BOWL.

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Notes

  1. Note that the symbols \(\bullet \) represents “such that”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Computing 1, 13 Computing Drive, Singapore, 117417, Singapore

    Jin Song Dong, Colin Keng-Yan Tan & Bimlesh Wadhwa

  2. SAS Institute, Singapore, 20 Anson Rd, Singapore, 079912, Singapore

    Yuzhang Feng

  3. Faculty of IT, Monash University, Wellington Road, Clayton, VIC, 3800, Australia

    Yuan-Fang Li

  4. School of Engineering and Applied Science, Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham, B4 7ET, UK

    Hai H. Wang

Authors
  1. Jin Song Dong
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  2. Yuzhang Feng
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  5. Bimlesh Wadhwa
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  6. Hai H. Wang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yuan-Fang Li.

Appendix: Partial CLP implementation for Algorithm 2

Appendix: Partial CLP implementation for Algorithm 2

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Dong, J.S., Feng, Y., Li, YF. et al. BOWL: augmenting the Semantic Web with beliefs. Innovations Syst Softw Eng 11, 203–215 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11334-015-0243-9

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