PR-OWL: A Bayesian extension to the OWL Ontology Language
PR-OWL is an open research work aimed to extend the OWLGo to the OWL Features Webpage (external website). ontology Web language so it can represent probabilistic ontologies. In other words, it is a probabilistic extension to OWL that provides a framework for authoring probabilistic ontologies and is based on the Bayesian first-order logic called Multi-Entity Bayesian Networks (MEBN).
Uncertainty is ubiquitous. Any representation scheme intended to model real-world actions and processes must be able to cope with the effects of uncertain phenomena.
A major shortcoming of existing Semantic Web technologies is their inability to represent and reason about uncertainty in a sound and principled manner. This not only hinders the realization of the original vision for the Semantic Web, but also raises an unnecessary barrier to the development of new, powerful features for general knowledge applications.
The overall goal of our research is to establish a Bayesian framework for probabilistic ontologies, providing a basis for plausible reasoning services in the Semantic Web. As an initial effort towards this broad objective, this dissertation introduces a probabilistic extension to the Web ontology language OWL, thereby creating a crucial enabling technology for the development of probabilistic ontologies.
