PR-OWL: A Framework for Bayesian Ontologies
Date
2006-11
Authors
Costa, Paulo C.G.
Laskey, Kathryn B.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
IOS Press
Abstract
Across a wide range of domains, there is an urgent need for a wellfounded approach to incorporating uncertain and incomplete knowledge into formal domain ontologies. Although this subject is receiving increasing attention from ontology researchers, there is as yet no broad consensus on the definition of a probabilistic ontology and on the most suitable approach to extending current ontology languages to support uncertainty. This paper presents two contributions to developing a coherent framework for probabilistic ontologies: (1) a formal definition of a probabilistic ontology, and (2) an extension of the OWL Web Ontology Language that is consistent with our formal definition. This extension, PR-OWL, is based on Multi-Entity Bayesian Networks (MEBN), a first-order Bayesian logic that unifies Bayesian probability with First-Order Logic. As such, PR-OWL combines the full representation power of OWL with the flexibility and inferential power of Bayesian logic.
Description
Keywords
Probabilistic Ontologies, Uncertainty, PR-OWL, MEBN, Bayesian networks
Citation
Formal Ontology in Information Systems - Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference (FOIS 2006), B. Bennett and C. Fellbaum (Eds.), Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, vol. 150, pp. 237-249, October 2006