Granular computing applied to ontologies

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 applications. A challenge is to define semantic knowledge at different levels of human-depending detail. In this paper we propose 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.