Cooperative Domain Ontology Reduction Based on Rough Sets

Ontology is widely used in the areas of knowledge engineering, web-based data mining, and others. The process of developing and evolving inter-organizational domain ontologies is easy to get much redundant information. Rough set theory can be used to reduce the attributes of ontologies. This type of reduction eliminates the harsh requirements of the reduct and overcomes the drawback of the possible reduct that the derived decision rules may be incompatible with the ones derived from the original system. In this paper, we formulate the preliminaries of using Rough Set Theory to solve this problem while building or evolving process of the inter-organizational domain ontology. This technique can be used to enhance automatic and semi-automatic operations to develop and evolve ontologies.