A limitation of standard Description Logics is its inability to reason with uncertain and vague knowledge. Although probabilistic and fuzzy extensions of DLs exist, which provide an explicit representation of uncertainty, they do not provide an explicit means for reasoning about second order uncertainty. Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence (DST) overcomes this weakness and provides means to fuse and reason about uncertain information. In this paper, we combine DL-Lite with DST to allow scalable reasoning over uncertain semantic knowledge bases. Furthermore, our formalism allows for the detection of conflicts between the fused information and domain constraints. Finally, we propose methods to resolve such conflicts through trust revision by exploiting evidence regarding the information sources. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is shown through simulations under various settings.

Date Published: 28 May 2013
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 8758, Next-Generation Analyst, 87580C (28 May 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2015667

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8758:
Next-Generation Analyst
Barbara D. Broome; David L. Hall; James Llinas, Editor(s)