FOCUS OWL-FC: an upper ontology for semantic modeling of Fuzzy Control C. De Maio • G. Fenza • D. Furno • V. Loia • S. Senatore Published online: 9 November 2011 Ó Springer-Verlag 2011 Abstract This work introduces an OWL-based upper ontology, called OWL-FC (Ontology Web Language for Fuzzy Control), capable to support a semantic definition of Fuzzy Control. It focuses on the fuzzy rules representation by providing domain independent ontology, supporting interoperability and favoring domain ontologies re-usabil- ity. The main contribution is that OWL-FC exploits Fuzzy Logic in OWL to model vagueness and uncertainty of the real world. Moreover, OWL-FC enables automatic dis- covery and execution of fuzzy controllers, by means of context aware parameter setting: appropriate controllers can be activated, depending on the parameters proactively identified in the work environment. In fact, the semantic modeling of concepts allows the characterization of con- straints and restrictions for the identification of the right matches between concepts and individuals. OWL-FC ontology provides a wide, semantic-based interoperability among different domain ontologies, through the specifica- tion of fuzzy concepts, independently by the application domain. Then, OWL-FC is coherent to the Semantic Web infrastructure and avoids inconsistencies in the ontology. Keywords Ontology  OWL-S  Fuzzy Control 1 Introduction The Semantic Web has contributed to change the models of communication and interactions in last decades, with a profound impact on the human society. It defines a new model to connect different sources of information such as web pages, posts, databases, etc., which enable computers and people to work in co-operation. Past research in Semantic Web attracted attention of two-value-based log- ical methods, but more recent trends aim at handling imprecise or uncertain information encountered in real world knowledge (Sanche 2006), through fuzzy models which can reinforce semantic-based systems and bridge the gap between vague human-understanding and hard machine-processing. The use of fuzzy techniques in the ontology modeling can provide an adequate add-on to reflect real world capture uncertainty in the relationship and conceptual information. This paper presents an OWL-based upper ontology, called OWL-FC (Ontology Web Language for Fuzzy Control) which, by means of a set of markup language constructs, provides semantic specification of Fuzzy Con- trol in a high-level, semantic form. OWL-FC has been designed by completely reflecting the modeling of OWL-S (Martin et al. 2004). In fact, we have built a parallel model for the deployment of the fuzzy control (instead of OWL-S web service) capabilities, through the three homonymic modules: ‘‘Profile’’, ‘‘Model’’ and ‘‘Grounding’’, (details are given in Sect. 3). Behind the benefits of a high-level abstraction language of specification, this modeling can easily translate and deploy a Fuzzy Control in a web service. C. De Maio (&)  G. Fenza  D. Furno  V. Loia  S. Senatore CORISA (Consorzio Ricerca Sistemi ad Agenti), Dipartimento di Informatica, Universita ´ degli Studi di Salerno, via Ponte don Melillo, 84084 Fisciano (SA), Italy e-mail: cdemaio@unisa.it G. Fenza e-mail: gfenza@unisa.it D. Furno e-mail: gfurno@unisa.it V. Loia e-mail: loia@unisa.it S. Senatore e-mail: ssenatore@unisa.it 123 Soft Comput (2012) 16:1153–1164 DOI 10.1007/s00500-011-0790-4