Gloria Bordogna Livres

First of all, I would like to congratulate Gabriella Pasi and Gloria Bordogna for the work they accomplished in preparing this new book in the series „Study in Fuzziness and Soft Computing“. „Recent Issues on the Management of Fuzziness in Databases“ is undoubtedly a token of their long-lasting and active involvement in the area of Fuzzy Information Retrieval and Fuzzy Database Systems. This book is really welcome in the area of fuzzy databases where they are not numerous although the first works at the crossroads of fuzzy sets and databases were initiated about twenty years ago by L. Zadeh. Only five books have been published since 1995, when the first volume dedicated to fuzzy databases published in the series „Study in Fuzziness and Soft Computing“ edited by J. Kacprzyk and myself appeared. Going beyond books strictly speaking, let us also mention the existence of review papers that are part of a couple of handbooks related to fuzzy sets published since 1998. The area known as fuzzy databases covers a bunch of topics among which: -flexible queries addressed to regular databases, -the extension of the notion of a functional dependency, -data mining and fuzzy summarization, -querying databases containing imperfect attribute values represented thanks to possibility distributions.

A more intuitive and powerful representation, access, and retrieval of information is essential in modern information systems, which serve a diverse user base across various tasks. The management of imprecision and uncertainty in databases has emerged as a significant research area, evidenced by the growing number of special sessions at international conferences. This topic has evolved independently within the traditional database community and the fuzzy sets research community, with recent collaborative efforts. Following the Workshop on “Supporting Imprecision and Uncertainty in Flexible Databases” at the DEXA Conference in Zaragoza in August 2004, our goal has been to unite researchers from databases, Information Retrieval, Spatial Information Systems, knowledge representation, and multimedia to exchange experiences and methods for managing uncertainty and imprecision in databases. This volume compiles contributions from renowned pioneers who have proposed models and applications for representing and managing uncertainty in databases. To provide a comprehensive overview of existing methods for students, researchers, and practitioners, the volume includes survey chapters on classic topics such as flexible querying in databases and models for representing imperfect data.