<div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt
0pt0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="im"><br /></div>What use is there for fuzzy predicates? I think it would
mainlybe to<br /> stop more students from coming up with new implementations of the same<br /> thing over and over.<br
/></blockquote></div><br/>Well, I'm sorry if anyone of us who is involved on these projects have already explain the
trueusefulness of sqlf and fuzzy database, I guess we focus just in the technical problem, but never explain the
theory.<br/><br />For example here is a paragraph from Flexible queries in relational databases paper:<br /><br />
"Thispaper deals with this second type of "uncertainty" and is concerned essentially with<br />database language
extensionsin order to deal with more expressive requirements. Indeed,<br /> consider a query such that, for instance,
"retrievethe apartments which are not too expensive<br />and not too far from downtown". In such a case, there does not
exista definite threshold for<br />which the price becomes suddenly too high, but rather we have to discriminate
between<br/> prices which are perfectly acceptable for the user, and other prices, somewhat higher, which<br />are
stillmore or less acceptable (especially if the apartment is close to downtown). Note that<br />the meaning of vague
predicateexpressions like "not too expensive" is context/user<br /> dependent, rather than universal. Fuzzy set
membershipfunctions [26] are convenient tools<br />for modelling user's preference profiles and the large panoply of
fuzzyset connectives can<br />capture the different user attitudes concerning the way the different criteria present in
his/her<br/> query compensate or not; see [4] for a unified presentation in the fuzzy set framework of the<br
/>existingproposals for handling flexible queries. Moreover in a given query, some part of the<br />request may be less
importantto fulfill (e.g., in the above example, the price requirement<br /> may be judged more important than the
distanceto downtown); the handling of importance<br />leads to the need for weighted connectives, as it will be seen in
thefollowing."<br /><br /><br />I really think this could be something useful, but it is sometimes difficult to
implementand I'm trying to make a different and easy way to do things.<br /><br />regards<br />
