Fuzzy knowledge management for the semantic web (Q362343)

After a very brief introduction to the syntax and semantics of description logics and ontologies, to fuzzy sets, and to fuzzy ER, UML and database models, the book introduces fuzzy description logics, before dealing with the issues of ontology extraction, mapping, querying and storage, all within the paradigm of fuzzy logic and for the sake of the Semantic Web. The book reads more as a collection of papers that have hardly been reworked to make up a coherent whole. One reason that the book reads more as a collection of papers is that all references are for individual chapters, not for the whole book. It would be hard to know how many sentences of the book have not been reused from one of the authors' papers, be it with a change of a couple of words, when a reference such as ''[\textit{Z. M. Ma and Zhang, Fu and Yan, Li and Cheng, Jingwei}, ``Representing and Reasoning on Fuzzy UML Models: A Description Logic Approach'', Expert Syst. Appl., Vol. 38, 3, 2536--2549 (2011), \url{http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2010.08.042}, Pergamon Press, Inc. Tarrytown, NY, USA]'' is cited for the first time at the end of Chapter 4, whereas whole parts of Chapter 3 are from that paper. Another reason that the book reads more as a collection of papers is that every chapter starts with the same broad introduction and its many generic references, exactly as any paper does. If this book was genuinely a book, one would not read on page 100: ``It should be noted that, in real-world applications, information is often imprecise and uncertain''. At this point, readers should most definitely know it, and in case they had not known it before they started reading the book, the first few pages of the book would have made a good case for that point once and for all. The ``best'' occurrence of sentences of this kind is probably on page 243, as the first sentence of the last chapter: ``In recent years, the Semantic Web (\textit{Berners-Lee et al.\ 2001}) has gained considerable attention.'' It is reasonable to think that if this sentence has to be part of the book, then it can only be as its very first sentence\dots A third reason that the book reads more as a collection of papers is that there is no attempt whatsoever to organise the material in a systematic and effective manner. So many definitions are preceded with ``we briefly recall''. Conferences and even journal papers have limitations that make it hard or even impossible not to just briefly recall concepts and not present them with enough details, but the advantage, and the main purpose of writing a book is precisely to say more, say better, be systematic, and it is disappointing, to say the least, that for each chapter of this book, a few of the authors' papers could be selected that would cover all the material of that chapter in more detail. There are only very few examples, which are not completely worked out. Sometimes, a screenshot is included, on page 108 for instance, whose only purpose is to indicate to the reader that an application has been developed but no detail is provided on that application. While the reader feels that this book is even more than papers subjected to not exceeding strict page limits, so much space is wasted in providing many formal variations on the same notion. There are many description logics out there, there are many models of ontologies, but the purpose of a book should be to bring a bit of order, unify, articulate the notions instead of presenting many of their variations, which are still only some of their variations, with a large common core that is repeated again and again. Most of the book reads as a gratuitous exercise in ``formalising''. For one example, Definition 3.4, which occupies almost the entirety of pages 43 and 44, defines a ``fuzzy UML model'' as a sequence of nine functions and relations, subjected to various constraints. Why would a reader take the pain to ``learn'' a sequence of nine functions and relations, each of which is constrained in a piece of text that can span up to 10 lines, if this sequence of nine functions and relations is still another variation on similar ``notions'', if there is no good example that illustrates this formal object and makes the reader understand what is the purpose, the use, the relevance of these nine specific functions and relations, an example that shows that they are not just nine functions and relations amongst the infinitely many ways anyone might want to introduce nine functions and relations, if this formal object is not put to use to derive, if not deep results, at least some significant results? The book includes few results--``Theorems''--, which essentially are nothing but trivial verifications that the definitions work together as they are meant to. Surely, a table such as Table 5.5, which occupies the whole of pages 142 and 143, is not meant to be read, and luckily so as it is unreadable; but why include it then? The writing is extremely slack, the text is full of typos, even in the simplest and most common formal notions that have probably been used in so many of the authors' publications and that no author and no reviewer ever bothered to fix and ever will. Here are just a few examples amongst hundreds. In the table on page 11, EquivalentClasses(\(C_1 C_2\)) is defined in terms of \(C_1\), \dots, \(C_n\) while on the next line, DisjointClasses(\(C_1... C_n\)) is defined in terms of \(C_1\) and \(C_2\), with an inequality \(i\neq j\) when there is no \(i\) and \(j\). On page 26, some notions are defined in terms of a binary relation \(\mathit{SE}\) which has never been and will never be introduced. On page 64, one reads that ``\(o\) denotes an \(n\)-tuple of individuals whose \(i\)th element is \(o\)''. On page 67, one reads \(\{1,n_{\max}\}\) for \(\{1,\dots,n_{\max}\}\). Etc., etc., etc. Of course, the authors did not have enough time to take care of this kind of detail as this book is only one out of a very long list of publications which has to grow and grow and grow. The authors have achieved their objective to add this book to their list of publications. But I do not see that anyone would benefit from reading it.