A type-2 fuzzy ontology and its application to personal diabetic-diet recommendation

It has been widely pointed out that classical ontology is not sufficient to deal with imprecise and vague knowledge for some real-world applications like personal diabetic-diet recommendation. On the other hand, fuzzy ontology can effectively help to handle and process uncertain data and knowledge. This paper proposes a novel ontology model, which is based on interval type-2 fuzzy sets (T2FSs), called type-2 fuzzy ontology (T2FO), with applications to knowledge representation in the field of personal diabetic-diet recommendation. The T2FO is composed of 1) a type-2 fuzzy personal profile ontology ( type-2 FPPO); 2) a type-2 fuzzy food ontology ( type-2 FFO); and 3) a type-2 fuzzy-personal food ontology (type-2 FPFO). In addition, the paper also presents a T2FS-based intelligent diet-recommendation agent ( IDRA), including 1) T2FS construction; 2) a T2FS-based personal ontology filter; 3) a T2FS-based fuzzy inference mechanism; 4) a T2FS-based diet-planning mechanism; 5) a T2FS-based menu-recommendation mechanism; and 6) a T2FS-based semantic-description mechanism. In the proposed approach, first, the domain experts plan the diet goal for the involved diabetes and create the nutrition facts of common Taiwanese food. Second, the involved diabetics are requested to routinely input eaten items. Third, the ontology-creating mechanism constructs a T2FO, including a type-2 FPPO, a type-2 FFO, and a set of type-2 FPFOs. Finally, the T2FS-based IDRA retrieves the built T2FO to recommend a personal diabetic meal plan. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can work effectively and that the menu can be provided as a reference for the involved diabetes after diet validation by domain experts. © 2010 IEEE