A Metaontology for Annotating Ontology Entities with Vagueness Descriptions

The emergence in the last years of initiatives like the Linked Open Data (LOD) has led to a significant increase in the amount of structured semantic data on the Web. Central role to this development has been played by ontologies, as these enable the representation of real world domains in an explicit and formal way and, thus, the production of commonly understood and shareable semantic data. Nevertheless, the shareability and wider reuse of such data can be hampered by the existence of vagueness within it, as this makes the data’s meaning less explicit. With that in mind, in this paper we present and evaluate the Vagueness Ontology, a metaontology that enables the explicit identification and description of vague entities and their vagueness-related characteristics in ontologies. The rationale is that such descriptions, when accompanying vague ontologies, may narrow the possible interpretations that the latter’s vague elements may assume by its users.