Automatic discovery of degrees of fuzzy set membership in ontologies

Abstract

This paper describes a method to automatically assign degrees of fuzzy set membership to individuals that have been asserted to be members of several classes. The method is tested in two variants on the case of persons who have several occupations as per Wikidata. While neither subclass is immediately successful, the new heuristic still proves to be sufficiently promising to document as an alternative to binary subclass assignment because it allows for degrees of membership that are emergent from existing knowledge bases rather than requiring manual assignment of arbitrary levels of crisp class membership.