SPECIAL SESSION at EUSFLAT-LFA 2011

TOPIC: Fuzzy information retrieval and database systems

ORGANIZERS:
Guy De Tré (Ghent University, Belgium, guy.detre@telin.ugent.be)
Allel Hadjali (IRISA/ENSSAT, France, Allel.Hadjali@enssat.fr)
Olivier Pivert (IRISA/ENSSAT, France, Olivier.Pivert@enssat.fr)
Slawomir Zadrozny (Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland, Slawomir.Zadrozny@ibspan.waw.pl)

Supported by the EUSFLAT Working Group on Soft Computing in Database Management and
Information Retrieval.

SCOPE:
Nowadays, one of the most crucial challenges raised by modern Database Management Systems, and by Information Systems in general, concerns their ability to support a huge volume of data which can be heterogeneous, imprecise, uncertain, incomplete and/or inconsistent. From a user's point of view, it is thus very desirable for such systems to possess high flexibility. Flexibility in such a context might be understood in several ways, among which the following ones are most important:

i) the capability of querying large amount of data in a user-friendly way so as to retrieve the information which is the most relevant to specific user needs;
ii) the capability of managing and exploiting imprecise, partially known, and uncertain data.

Fuzzy Logic and Soft Computing have, for a long time, constituted an important source of inspiration for numerous research works aimed at dealing with various facets of flexibility in Databases and Information Systems. The primary aim of this special session is to highlight the latest scientific advances within the Fuzzy Logic and Soft Computing fields applied to Databases and Information Retrieval Systems.

This special session will be an exciting opportunity to exchange ideas and to discuss theoretical and experimental results in this research domain. Hopefully, it will contribute to identifying new promising directions of research and unsolved problems in this area.

We invite contributions that focus on the application of:
- fuzzy set theory
- fuzzy logic
- soft computing

within the following, non-exhaustive, list of fields:
- regular and fuzzy databases
- information retrieval
- semi-structured data
- geographical information systems
- multimedia information systems
- web search engines.

We encourage submission of papers, which have not been published or submitted to any other conference, concerning theoretical advances in these core areas as well as papers which deal with some practical insights resulting from experiments or implementations.

The same deadline as for the regular papers to be submitted to EUSFLAT-LFA 2011 will be observed. However, the potential contributors are requested to send at their earliest convenience an e-mail message, addressed to pivert@enssat.fr, confirming the intent to submit a paper and preferably giving its tentative title and a list of the authors.

Submitted papers must comply with the EUSFLAT-LFA 2011 guidelines for submission. Papers submitted to this special session will go through the normal reviewing process. The accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings. After the conference, selected authors will be invited to submit extended and revised versions of their papers for a possible inclusion in a special issue of an international journal.

CONTACT INFORMATION
Guy DE TRE (Guy.DeTre@UGent.be),
Allel HADJALI (Allel.Hadjali@enssat.fr),
Olivier PIVERT (Olivier.Pivert@enssat.fr),
Slawomir ZADROZNY (Slawomir.Zadrozny@ibspan.waw.pl)