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Since the emergence of the formal concept of probability theory in the seventeenth century, uncertainty has been perceived solely in terms of probability theory. However, this apparently unique link between uncertainty and probability theory has come under investigation a few decades back. Uncertainties are nowadays accepted to be of various kinds. Uncertainty in general could refer to different sense like not certainly known, questionable, problematic, vague, not definite or determined, ambiguous, liable to change, not reliable. In Indian languages, particularly in Sanskrit-based languages, there are other higher levels of uncertainties. It has been shown that several mathematical concepts such as the theory of fuzzy sets, theory of rough sets, evidence theory, possibility theory, theory of complex systems and complex network, theory of fuzzy measures and uncertainty theory can also successfully model uncertainty.

This book contains revised and significantly extended versions of selected papers from three workshops on Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web (URSW), held at the International Semantic Web Conferences (ISWC) in 2011, 2012, and 2013. The 16 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers included in this volume are organized in topical sections on probabilistic and Dempster-Shafer models, fuzzy and possibilistic models, inductive reasoning and machine learning, and hybrid approaches.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th EuropeanConference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty, ECSQARU 2013, held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, in July 2013. The 44 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed andselected from 89 submissions. Papers come from researchers interested in advancing the technology and from practitioners using uncertainty techniques in real-world applications. The scope of the ECSQARU conferences encompasses fundamental issues, representation, inference, learning, and decision making in qualitative and numeric uncertainty paradigms.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty, ECSQARU 2009, held in Verona, Italy, July 1-3, 2009. There are 76 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited lectures by three outstanding researchers in the area. All papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 118 submissions for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on algorithms for uncertain inference, argumentation systems, Bayesian networks, Belief functions, Belief revision and inconsistency handling, classification and clustering, conditioning, independence, inference, default reasoning, foundations of reasoning, decision making under uncertainty, Fuzzy sets and Fuzzy logic, implementation and application of uncertain systems, logics for reasoning under uncertainty, Markov decision process, and Mathematical Fuzzy Logic.

It is commonly assumed that computers process information. But what is inf- mation? In a technical, important, but nevertheless rather narrow sense, Sh- non'sinformationtheorygivesa?rstanswertothisquestion.Thistheoryfocuses on measuring the information content of a message. Essentially this measure is the reduction of the uncertainty obtained by receiving a message. The unc- tainty of a situation of ignorance in turn is measured by entropy. This theory hashad an immense impact on the technologyof information storage,data c- pression, information transmission and coding and still is a very active domain of research. Shannon's theory has also attractedmuch interest in a more philosophic look at information, although it was readily remarked that it is only a “syntactic” theory of information and neglects “semantic” issues. Several attempts have been made in philosophy to give information theory a semantic?avor, but still mostly based on or at least linked to Shannon's theory. Approaches to semantic informationtheoryalsoveryoftenmakeuseofformallogic.Thereby,information is linked to reasoning, deduction and inference, as well as to decision making. Further, entropy and related measure were soon found to have important connotations with regard to statistical inference. Surely, statistical data and observation represent information, information about unknown, hidden para- ters. Thus a whole branch of statistics developed around concepts of Shannon's information theory or derived from them. Also some proper measurements - propriate for statistics, like Fisher's information, were proposed.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Scalable Uncertainty Management, SUM 2008, held in Naples, Italy, in Oktober 2008. The 27 revised full papers presented together with the extended abstracts of 3 invited talks/tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions. The papers address artificial intelligence researchers, database researchers, and practitioners to demonstrate theoretical techniques required to manage the uncertainty that arises in large scale real world applications and to cope with large volumes of uncertainty and inconsistency in databases, the Web, the semantic Web, and artificial intelligence in general.

Conditionals are fascinating and versatile objects of knowledge representation. On the one hand, they may express rules in a very general sense, representing, for example, plausible relationships, physical laws, and social norms. On the other hand, as default rules or general implications, they constitute a basic tool for reasoning, even in the presence of uncertainty. In this sense, conditionals are intimately connected both to information and inference. Due to their non-Boolean nature, however, conditionals are not easily dealt with. They are not simply true or false — rather, a conditional “if A then B” provides a context, A, for B to be plausible (or true) and must not be confused with “A entails B” or with the material implication “not A or B.” This ill- trates how conditionals represent information, understood in its strict sense as reduction of uncertainty. To learn that, in the context A, the proposition B is plausible, may reduce uncertainty about B and hence is information. The ab- ity to predict such conditioned propositions is knowledge and as such (earlier) acquired information. The?rst work on conditional objects dates back to Boole in the 19th c- tury, and the interest in conditionals was revived in the second half of the 20th century, when the emerging Arti?cial Intelligence made claims for appropriate formaltoolstohandle“generalizedrules.”Sincethen,conditionalshavebeenthe topic of countless publications, each emphasizing their relevance for knowledge representation, plausible reasoning, nonmonotonic inference, and belief revision.

These are the proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty, ECSQARU 2005, held in Barcelona (Spain), July 6–8, 2005. The ECSQARU conferences are biennial and have become a major forum for advances in the theory and practice of r- soning under uncertainty. The?rst ECSQARU conference was held in Marseille (1991), and after in Granada (1993), Fribourg (1995), Bonn (1997), London (1999), Toulouse (2001) and Aalborg (2003). The papers gathered in this volume were selected out of 130 submissions, after a strict review process by the members of the Program Committee, to be presented at ECSQARU 2005. In addition, the conference included invited lectures by three outstanding researchers in the area, Seraf´?n Moral (Imprecise Probabilities), Rudolf Kruse (Graphical Models in Planning) and J´ erˆ ome Lang (Social Choice). Moreover, the application of uncertainty models to real-world problems was addressed at ECSQARU 2005 by a special session devoted to s- cessful industrial applications, organized by Rudolf Kruse. Both invited lectures and papers of the special session contribute to this volume. On the whole, the programme of the conference provided a broad, rich and up-to-date perspective of the current high-level research in the area which is re?ected in the contents of this volume. IwouldliketowarmlythankthemembersoftheProgramCommitteeandthe additional referees for their valuable work, the invited speakers and the invited session organizer.