A FML-based hybrid reasoner combining fuzzy ontology and Mamdani inference

Fuzzy ontologies have been employed to represent and reason over fuzzy information, which often occurs in real-world applications. Fuzzy inference systems (FIS) are well-known computational intelligence systems whose inferences can also be exploited in fuzzy ontology-based applications. Specifically, the combination of fuzzy ontologies and Mamdani-type FIS can provide inferences involving fuzzy rules and numerical property values, which can be considered in other fuzzy ontology reasoning tasks. In this sense, this paper proposes a hybrid reasoner combining fuzzy ontology and Mamdani inference to provide meaningful inferences that are not available to fuzzy ontology-based applications in an integrated way. Fuzzy rules are represented with Fuzzy Markup Language, providing an abstraction level with regard to the underlying FIS implementation. Some experiments are presented regarding a recommender system context, including a comparison with a fuzzy description logic reasoner in terms of fuzzy rule reasoning semantics and integration issues.