Dealing with Similarity Relations in Fuzzy Ontologies

Crisp ontologies become less suitable in all domains in which the concepts to be represented have imprecise definitions. Fuzzy ontologies are developed to overcome this problem. Determining similarity relations among fuzzy ontology components is essential for many reuse subprocesses, for query rewriting as well as for fuzzy ontology modeling. Denning similarity relations within fuzzy context may be realized basing on the linguistic similarity among ontology components or may be deduced from their intensional definitions. The later approach needs to be dealt with differently in crisp and fuzzy ontologies. In the first case, two ontology components are related by a given similarity relation or not. In the second one, two ontology components have a degree to be related by a given similarity relation. This is the scope of this paper.