Flexible databases supporting imprecision and uncertainty

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.