A Probabilistic OWL Reasoner for Intelligent Environments

Abstract

OWL ontologies have gained great popularity as a context modelling tool for intelligent environments due to their expressivity. However, they present some disadvantages when it is necessary to deal with uncertainty, which is common in our daily life and affects the de- cisions that we take. To overcome this drawback, we have developed a novel framework to compute fact probabilities from the axioms in an OWL ontology. This proposal comprises the definition and description of our probabilistic ontology. Our probabilistic ontology extends OWL 2 DL with a new layer to model uncertainty. With this work we aim to overcome OWL limitations to reason with uncertainty, developing a novel framework that can be used in intelligent environments.