Aggregating linguistic expert knowledge in type-2 fuzzy ontologies

In many industrial contexts, knowledge and data provided by experts are imprecise as there seems to be an understanding that “experts do not need precise details as they understand anyway what is meant”. The imprecision inherent in the knowledge that experts acquire in their practice require decision support tools that can be tailored to the specific application contexts to aid complex decisions. As a specific example, expert knowledge expressed in linguistic terms is not precisely structured and concepts are not defined specifically enough in order to be easy to use and process. If we want to represent and use expert knowledge for knowledge-based systems on a general level, that is easily adaptable, we need to find ways to represent and process knowledge elements; our approach is to use interval-valued fuzzy sets, fuzzy ontology and aggregation operators. We show that these instruments will offer us a novel approach for aggregation of imprecise data to obtain actionable knowledge to aid complex decisions. The framework is described and the approach is shown through the context of a fuzzy wine ontology; the problem formulation resembles many features of important and complex decision making problems found in different industries. We describe the potential application of the framework in the case of paper machine maintenance. A web-based application is introduced to better demonstrate the benefits decision-makers can receive from the proposed framework. Additionally, we present an approach to utilize the framework in finding consensual solutions in situations involving several experts.