“Tell me the important stuff” - fuzzy ontologies and personal assessments for interaction with the semantic web

The semantic Web attempts to make the Web an universal medium of data exchange. To achieve this it needs to both make data sources accessible to machine-based systems, such as software agents and allow humans to easily create, understand and search for these data sources. Crisp ontologies are extremely useful for improving data extraction from structured data. However many ontological approaches require an unnatural level of precision and rigidity when dealing with real user queries or data sources. Previous work has suggested that fuzzification of ontologies may increase their utility. A major area of activity in the search and ubiquitous computing space is the development of location aware services. This paper suggests that in the mobile and context-aware semantic Web environment, fuzzification needs to extend to the representation of the importance of particular. Additionally, mobile devices tend to require simple interfaces and work with low bandwidth, this implies that obtaining small numbers of relevant results is extremely important. The work previously done in representing uncertainty in geographical information systems may assist in this development. This paper suggest that the combination of the use of fuzzy ontologies and fuzzy spatial relations may be effective in increasing the usefulness of the mobile semantic Web.