Type-2 fuzzy description logic

Description logics (DLs) are widely employed in recent semantic web application systems. However, classical description logics are limited when dealing with imprecise concepts and roles, thus providing the motivation for this work. In this paper, we present a type-2 fuzzy attributive concept language with complements (ALC) and provide its knowledge representation and reasoning algorithms. We also propose type-2 fuzzy web ontology language (OWL) to build a fuzzy ontology based on type-2 fuzzy ALC and analyze the soundness, completeness, and complexity of the reasoning algorithms. Compared to type-1 fuzzy ALC, type-2 fuzzy ALC can describe imprecise knowledge more meticulously by using the membership degree interval. We implement a semantic search engine based on type-2 fuzzy ALC and carry out experiments on real data to test its performance. The results show that the type-2 fuzzy ALC can improve the precision and increase the number of relevant hits for imprecise information searches.