Construction of fuzzy ontologies from fuzzy XML models

The success and proliferation of the Semantic Web depends heavily on construction of Web ontologies. However, classical ontology construction approaches are not sufficient for handling imprecise and uncertain information that is commonly found in many application domains. Therefore, great efforts on construction of fuzzy ontologies have been made in recent years. In particular, XML is imposing itself as a standard for representing and exchanging information on the Web, topics related to the modeling of fuzzy data have become very interesting in the XML data context. Therefore, constructing fuzzy ontologies from fuzzy XML data resources may make the existing fuzzy XML data upgrade to Semantic Web contents, and the constructed fuzzy ontologies may be useful for improving some fuzzy XML applications. This paper proposes a formal approach and an automated tool for constructing fuzzy ontologies from fuzzy XML data resources. Firstly, we propose a formal definition of fuzzy XML models (including the document structure fuzzy DTDs and the document content fuzzy XML documents). On this basis, we propose a formal approach for constructing fuzzy ontologies from fuzzy XML models, i.e., transforming a fuzzy XML model (including fuzzy DTD and fuzzy XML document) into a fuzzy ontology. Also, we give the proof of correctness of the construction approach, and provide a detailed construction example. Furthermore, we implement a prototype tool called FXML2FOnto, which can automatically construct fuzzy ontologies from fuzzy XML models. Finally, in order to show that the constructed fuzzy ontologies may be useful for improving some fuzzy XML applications, we focus on investigating how to reason on fuzzy XML models (e.g., conformance, inclusion, and equivalence) based on the constructed fuzzy ontologies, and it turns out that the reasoning tasks of fuzzy XML models can be checked by means of the reasoning mechanism of fuzzy ontologies.