Chapter 16 Processing fuzzy information in semantic web applications

Abstract The actual “Version” of the World Wide Web is surely one of the most important achievements of the last decades. But it suffers from the intrinsic deficit to include the semantic structure of the offered information or knowledge as HTML was developed to format the content instead of describing the logical structure. While the actual research on semantic web and RDF offer improvements for this situation, it is likely that the problem will not be solved completely. This is mainly caused by the fuzziness of human language and the fact that the boundaries of ontologies cannot be defined exactly. This article shows a description and a general methodology based on fuzzy inference in order to close this gap. The usage of fuzzy logic allows it to represent and process ambiguous facts making it possible to reconstruct the fuzziness of the real world and human way of thinking. Based on this representation and ability of processing it, better search algorithms can be developed and implemented in order to gain better results.