A fuzzy ontology model for qualitative spatial reasoning

Spatial relations and spatial reasoning are essential in cognitive systems. Human uses qualitative words of natural language to represent his perceptions about spatial structures. Computational systems which want to manipulate this perception need to be able to convert quantitative data into qualitative ones and vice versa. These perceptions are normally described by imprecise, vague and relative concepts. On the other hand, fuzzy ontologies are proposed to handle vague or imprecise ontological knowledge. In this paper we propose a new model based on fuzzy ontologies to support qualitative spatial reasoning. It proposes a method of representing qualitative data as fuzzy attribute values in an ontology.