Uncertainty Reasoning in Description Logics: A Generic Approach

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Description Logics (DLs) are gaining more popularity as the foundation of ontology languages for the Semantic Web. As most information in real life is imperfect, there has been an increasing interest recently in extending the expressive power of DLs with uncertainty, for which a number of frameworks have been proposed. In this paper, we introduce an extension of DL which unifies and/or generalizes a number of existing approaches for DLs with uncertainty. For this, we first provide a classification of existing frameworks for DLs with uncertainty on the basis of their underlying certainty formalisms. Using this as a basis, we introduce a generic framework for DL with uncertainty by extending components of the DL framework, i.e., the description language, the knowledge base, and the reasoning services.