Which role for an ontology of uncertainty?

An Ontology of Uncertainty, like the one proposed by the W3C’s UR3W-XG incubator group, provides a vocabulary to annotate different sources of information with different types of uncertainty. Here we argue that such annotations should be clearly mapped to corresponding reasoning and representation strategies. This mapping allows the system to analyse the information on the basis of its uncertainty model, running the inference proccess according to the respective uncertainty. As a proof of concepts we present a data integration system implementing a semantics-aware matching strategy based on an ontological representation of the uncertain/inconsistent matching relations generated by the various matching operators. In this scenario the sources of information to be analyzed according to different uncertainty models are independent and no intersection among them is to be managed. This particular case allows a straight-forward use of the Ontology of Uncertainty to drive the reasoning process, although in general the assumption of independence among the source of information is a lucky case. This position paper highlights the need of additional work on the Ontology of Uncertainty in order to support reasoning processes when combinations of uncertainty models are to be applied on a single source of information.