Paper Summary - BeliefOWL: An Evidential Representation in OWL Ontology

Amira Essaid and Boutheina Ben Yaghlane, BeliefOWL: An Evidential Representation in OWL Ontology, pages 77-80, International Semantic Web Conference, International Workshop on Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web, Washington DC, USA, 2009.


This paper is very short, only 4 pages. It starts with a discussion of how uncertainty is represented currently in ontologies using either probabilistic or fuzzy approaches. It then proposed the Dempster-Shafer approach as another option. They discuss the work by :
Ben Yaghlane,B.: Uncertainty representation and reasoning in directed evidential
networks, PhD thesis, Institut Sup´erieur de Gestion de Tunis Tunisia, 2002.

which is work related to representing uncertainty using a DAG. I haven't read this paper yet but it certainly seems like a good read.

This paper then goes on with a presentation of BeliefOWL, their uncertainty extension to OWL.


They define two classes to represent prior evidence:


- enumerates different masses and has object property which specifies the relation between itself and .


- expreses prior evidence and has property



They define two classes which represent conditional evidence:


- has an object property of


- conditional evidence with property



They construct an evidential network by translating the OWL ontology into a DAG. They then assign masses to nodes in the DAG. Details of this work are mentioned but briefly.

Overall I don't know if this helps my work in anyway except to see some uses of DS with ontologies.