Reasoning of fuzzy relational databases with fuzzy ontologies
Fu Zhang, Li Yan, Zongmin Ma · International Journal of Intelligent Systems · 2012
A significant interest developed regarding the problem of describing databases with expressive knowledge representation techniques in recent years, so that database reasoning may be handled intelligently. Therefore, it is possible and meaningful to investigate how to reason on fuzzy relational databases (FRDBs) with fuzzy ontologies. In this paper, we first propose a formal approach and an automated tool for constructing fuzzy ontologies from FRDBs, and then we study how to reason on FRDBs with constructed fuzzy ontologies. First, we give their respective formal definitions of FRDBs and fuzzy Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontologies. On the basis of this, we propose a formal approach that can directly transform an FRDB (including its schema and data information) into a fuzzy OWL ontology (consisting of the fuzzy ontology structure and instance). Furthermore, following the proposed approach, we implement a prototype construction tool called FRDB2FOnto. Finally, based on the constructed fuzzy OWL ontologies, we investigate how to reason on FRDBs (e.g., consistency, satisfiability, subsumption, and redundancy) through the reasoning mechanism of fuzzy OWL ontologies, so that the reasoning of FRDBs may be done automatically by means of the existing fuzzy ontology reasoner.© 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.