A New Fuzzy Ontology Development Methodology (FODM) Proposal

There is an upsurge in applying fuzzy ontologies to represent vague information in the knowledge representation field. Current research in the fuzzy ontologies paradigm mainly focuses on developing formalism languages to represent fuzzy ontologies, designing fuzzy ontology editors, and building fuzzy ontology applications in different domains. Less focus falls on establishing a formal methodological approach for building fuzzy ontologies. Existing fuzzy ontology development methodologies, such as the IKARUS-Onto methodology and fuzzy ontomethodology, provide formalized schedules for the conversion from crisp ontologies into fuzzy ones. However, a formal guidance on how to build fuzzy ontologies from scratch still lacks in this paper. Therefore, this paper presents the first methodology, named fuzzy ontology development methodology (FODM), for developing fuzzy ontologies from scratch. The proposed FODM can provide a very good guideline for formally constructing fuzzy ontologies in terms of completeness, comprehensiveness, generality, efficiency, and accuracy. To explain how the FODM works and demonstrate its usefulness, a fuzzy seabed characterization ontology is built based on the FODM and described step by step.