BayesOWL

Dealing with uncertainty is crucial in ontology engineering tasks such as domain modeling, ontology reasoning, and concept mapping between ontologies. Our on-going research on modeling uncertainty in ontologies is based on Bayesian networks (BN). This includes 1) extending OWL to allow additional probabilistic markups for attaching probability information, 2) directly converting a probabilistically annotated OWL ontology into a BN structure by a set of structural translation rules, and 3) constructing the conditional probability tables (CPTs) of this BN using a new method based on iterative proportiobal fitting procedure (IPFP). The translated BN can support more accurate ontology reasoning under uncertainty as Bayesian inferences.