80 Int’l Journal of Cognitive Informatics and Natural Intelligence, 2(2), 80-9, April-June 2008 Copyright © 2008, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. AbStrAct Granular computing, initiated by Lotf A. Zadeh, has acquired wide popularity as a tool for approximate reasoning, fusion of knowledge, cognitive computing. The need for formal methods of granulation, and means for computing with granules, has been addressed in this work by applying methods of rough mere- ology. Rough mereology is an extension of mereology taking as the primitive notion the notion of a part to a degree. Granules are formed as classes of objects which are a part to a given degree of a given object. In addition to an exposition of this mechanism of granulation, we point also to some applications like granular logics for approximate reasoning and classifers built from granulated data sets Keywords: classifcation; fusion of knowledge; granules of knowledge; granulation of knowledge; granular systems; reasoning by granular logics; rough inclusions; rough mereology; rough sets; similarity NOtIONS cENtrAL tO GrANULAtION OF KNOWLEDGE Granulation of knowledge is one of important aspects of the way in which the human brain works (see, e.g., Pal, 2004). A vast literature on emulating such aspects of the brain workings as granulation, fusion of knowledge, classifcation by means of neural networks, fuzzy logics, and so on, does witness the role the computer sci- ence society attaches to them. These aspects are studied with at least a twofold purpose. First, to get an insight into the processes of percep- tion, concept formation, and reasoning in the brain; second, to transfer this knowledge into the realm of applications. The emergence of ample paradigms like cognitive informatics and natural intelligence (see, e.g., Chan, Kisner, Wang. & Miller, 2004; Kinsner, Zang, Wang, & Tsai, 2005; Patel, Patel, & Wang, 2003; Wang, 2007, Wang, Johnston, & Smith, 2002; Yao, Shi, Wang, & Kinsner, 2006) is due in large part to these On Foundations and Applications of the Paradigm of Granular rough computing Lech Polkowski, Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology, Poland Maria Semeniuk-Polkowska, Warsaw University, Poland IGI PUBLISHING This paper appears in the publication, International Journal of Cognitive Informatics and Natural Intelligence, Volume 2, Issue 2 edited by Yingxu Wang © 2008, IGI Global 701 E. Chocolate Avenue, Suite 200, Hershey PA 17033-1240, USA Tel: 717/533-8845; Fax 717/533-8661; URL-http://www.igi-global.com ITJ4181