What use is there for fuzzy predicates? I think it would mainly be to
stop more students from coming up with new implementations of the same
thing over and over.
Well, I'm sorry if anyone of us who is involved on these projects have already explain the true usefulness of sqlf and fuzzy database, I guess we focus just in the technical problem, but never explain the theory.
For example here is a paragraph from Flexible queries in relational databases paper:
"This paper deals with this second type of "uncertainty" and is concerned essentially with
database language extensions in order to deal with more expressive requirements. Indeed,
consider a query such that, for instance, "retrieve the apartments which are not too expensive
and not too far from downtown". In such a case, there does not exist a definite threshold for
which the price becomes suddenly too high, but rather we have to discriminate between
prices which are perfectly acceptable for the user, and other prices, somewhat higher, which
are still more or less acceptable (especially if the apartment is close to downtown). Note that
the meaning of vague predicate expressions like "not too expensive" is context/user
dependent, rather than universal. Fuzzy set membership functions [26] are convenient tools
for modelling user's preference profiles and the large panoply of fuzzy set connectives can
capture the different user attitudes concerning the way the different criteria present in his/her
query compensate or not; see [4] for a unified presentation in the fuzzy set framework of the
existing proposals for handling flexible queries. Moreover in a given query, some part of the
request may be less important to fulfill (e.g., in the above example, the price requirement
may be judged more important than the distance to downtown); the handling of importance
leads to the need for weighted connectives, as it will be seen in the following."
I really think this could be something useful, but it is sometimes difficult to implement and I'm trying to make a different and easy way to do things.
regards
