ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a comprehensive guide for developing a fuzzy ontology, covering all required stages from specification to validation. It presents a detailed description of IKARUS-Onto, augmented with suggested techniques, tools and best practices for each of the development process’s steps. The chapter examines some basic definitions and clarifications regarding the phenomenon of vagueness, discusses the way it is typically manifested in ontologies, and describes the typical elements a fuzzy ontology uses in order to represent it. Establishing the need for fuzziness practically means determining whether and to what extent vagueness is present in the domain at hand, as well as whether the intended uses of the ontology require the capturing of the vagueness. The formalization step involves the transformation of the defined fuzzy ontology elements into a formal machine-interpretable form through some corresponding fuzzy ontology language. Vague assertion gathering mechanisms can take many forms, depending on the application context of the fuzzy ontology.
