Advances in fuzzy querying: Theory and applications

✍ Scribed by Guy De Tré; Janusz Kacprzyk; Adnan Yazici; Sławomir Zadrożny

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 37 KB
• Volume: 26
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0884-8173
• DOI: 10.1002/int.20504

✦ Synopsis

Modern information systems, notably database management systems, are facing many challenges whose relevance and severity is constantly growing. These challenges are basically related to two aspects those systems are plagued of. The first is related to a sheer volume of data they have to deal with, and the second to a growing importance of the human factor in the sense that an overwhelming majority of users is novice, and yet they have to cope with huge data sets and sophisticated database technology. It is particularly true for all kinds of Web-based technologies, geographic information systems, multimedia systems, etc. This implies what might be called a "human-database gap" the essence of which is that, on the one hand, limited and not growing human cognitive abilities are contrasted with rapidly growing sets of data and information/database system performance. On the other hand, a growing sophistication of data sets and problems faced by humans call for tools providing retrieval of information needed which should reflect sophisticated, often not precisely stated, intentions and preferences that are far apart from what traditional, precise, and rigid querying languages may offer.

The purpose of this special issue is to collect new developments in that challenging field proposing more efficient and adequate data access, search, and querying techniques, which can bring about some breakthroughs for the above-mentioned problems faced by the modern IT/ICT. Soft computing and fuzzy set theory have been important tools in many research works that aim to deal with the intrinsic complexity of querying and