Construction of holistic Fuzzy Cognitive Maps using ontology matching method

Fuzzy Cognitive Map (FCM) is a powerful approach to model the dynamics of complex systems, and has been applied in various fields, such as psychology, education, engineering, and management. The construction of FCMs has great importance for its application. The literature, however, takes it for granted that Fuzzy Cognitive Maps allow for a simple aggregation of domain knowledge from several experts without much considering holistic approaches with semantic comparison of concepts. This paper describes the method for constructing Fuzzy Cognitive Maps based on the ontology matching approach in a holistic way. The ontology matching technology through a series of proposed operations is used to find the alignment between semantically related concepts and solves the semantic ambiguity problem, thereby improving the experts-based FCM construction method. This approach enhances the effective collaboration in the heterogeneous environment of today's internet-based world, and the proposed holistic FCMs also allows the user to draw additional observations concerning the underlying system, which are not available through the individual FCMs. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.