Ontological approach to development of computing with words based systems

Computing with words introduced by Zadeh becomes a very important concept in processing of knowledge represented in the form of propositions. Two aspects of this concept approximation and personalization - are essential to the process of building intelligent systems for human-centric computing. For the last several years, Artificial Intelligence community has used ontology as a means for representing knowledge. Recently, the development of a new Internet paradigm - the Semantic Web - has led to introduction of another form of ontology. It allows for defining concepts, identifying relationships among these concepts, and representing concrete information. In other words, an ontology has become a very powerful way of representing not only information but also its semantics. The paper proposes an application of ontology, in the sense of the Semantic Web, for development of computing with words based systems capable of performing operations on propositions including their semantics. The ontology-based approach is very flexible and provides a rich environment for expressing different types of information including perceptions. It also provides a simple way of personalization of propositions. An architecture of computing with words based system is proposed. A prototype of such a system is described. (c) 2008 Published by Elsevier Inc.