Granular computing applied to ontologies

Abstract. Granular Computing is an emerging conceptual and computing paradigm of information processing. A central notion is an information-processing pyramid with different levels of clarifications. Each level is usually represented by ‘chunks ’ of data or granules, also known as information granules. Rough Set Theory is one of the most widely used methodologies for handling or defining granules. Ontologies are used to represent the knowledge of a domain for specific ap-plications. A challenge is to define semantic knowledge at different levels of human-depending detail. In this paper we prose four operations in order to have several granular perspectives for a specific ontological commitment. Then these operations are used to have various views of an ontology built with a rough-set approach. In particular, a rough methodology is introduced to construct a specific granular view of an ontology