Uncertainty in Ontologies: Dempster-Shafer Theory for Data Fusion
  Applications
  Nowadays ontologies present a growing interest in Data Fusion applications.
As a matter of fact, the ontologies are seen as a semantic tool for describing
and reasoning about sensor data, objects, relations and general domain
theories. In addition, uncertainty is perhaps one of the most important
characteristics of the data and information handled by Data Fusion. However,
the fundamental nature of ontologies implies that ontologies describe only
asserted and veracious facts of the world. Different probabilistic, fuzzy and
evidential approaches already exist to fill this gap; this paper recaps the
most popular tools. However none of the tools meets exactly our purposes.
Therefore, we constructed a Dempster-Shafer ontology that can be imported into
any specific domain ontology and that enables us to instantiate it in an
uncertain manner. We also developed a Java application that enables reasoning
about these uncertain ontological instances.
