An Uncertain Distributed Method for Reasoning in Ontologies

Semantic web has been one of the most important research areas of computer science in recent years. The concept of ontology as one of the most elements of semantic web is used to formally describe the domain knowledge and to enable the reasoning capability. Semantic web is a distributed system and ontologies may be developed on many different nodes, so centralized reasoning is very hard or even impossible in many cases. On the other hand, since the majority of information in semantic web is uncertain, considering the notion of uncertainty in ontological reasoning is crucial. In this paper a method for distributed reasoning in uncertain ontologies is proposed. For this purpose the distributed description logic (DDL) framework and the certainty theory are considered for distributed reasoning and modeling the uncertainty respectively. To evaluate the functionality and performance of the algorithm, we developed a case study on application of the proposed method in purifying the mappings between ontologies. The results show that our algorithm makes the mappings more precise than other similar methods.