Soft Computing in Database Management and Information Retrieval

Special session at the EUSFLAT 2013 Conference - European Society for Fuzzy Logic and Technology which takes place in Milano, Italy, September 11-13, 2013.

Special session organizers

Guy De Tré (Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium)
Antoon Bronselaer (Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium)
Janusz Kacprzyk (Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland)
Sławomir Zadrożny (Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland)

The organization of this session is an initiative of the EUSFLAT Working Group on Soft Computing in Database Management and Information Retrieval (http://www.eusflat.org/research/scdbmir.htm).

Scope of the special session

Soft computing extends the facilities and effectiveness of database and information retrieval systems in order to make them more human consistent and able to represent real life data.

Information systems, in particular database management systems and information retrieval systems, have become a crucial IT-component in many businesses and organizations. Soft computing techniques can play an important role in extending facilities and effectiveness of such systems in order to make them better accessible and to cope with imperfection of the information dealt with herein, thereby explicitly considering the fact that information can be uncertain, imprecise, vaguely described, incomplete and/or inconsistent. Even if in the last 20 years data(base) modeling, database management, and database querying techniques as well as information retrieval modeling have been enriched and extended with soft computing methods, their potentials are still to be fully exploited. In particular, in this research context some hot topics include:

• Flexible querying in the framework of both database management systems and information retrieval systems, notably search engines. The main aim is to make queries more human consistent, notably via the use of the elements of natural language. This is to make queries easier to formulate by the user and more expressive at the same time.
• The handling of textual information including summarization, coreference detection and text merging.
• Semi-structured data modeling, with a special emphasis on some XML-related techniques.
• The use of thesauri and ontologies to enrich both information content and query representations, notably taking into account a gradual character of relations between the terms/concepts.
• The handling of context features and their use in flexible querying and information retrieval.
• The management of multimedia information. Hereby, it is, among others, studied how content based descriptions of texts, audio, images and video could be employed to compare and to inquire multimedia databases. Because of the fact that the features to describe contents are in some cases automatically extracted, imperfection of information must also be taken into account.
• Soft computing based knowledge discovery in databases, notably closely integrated with database management such as in the case of linguistic summaries of data.
• Intelligent information systems meant in a broad perspective as (a part of) decision support systems integrating all above mentioned techniques in order to provide the support for the decision maker.
• Indexing and performance issues which are vital for the success of the developed soft computing based solutions.

The objective of the special session is to provide an opportunity for exchanging ideas related to the application of fuzzy logic and soft computing in the above mentioned areas. The special session aims at providing a forum for the discussion of recent advances in this research field and to offer an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to identify new promising research directions.

The organizers welcome contributions that report on the application of

• fuzzy set theory
• fuzzy logic
• soft computing

within the fields of (but not limited to)

• fuzzy databases
• information retrieval
• content based information retrieval
• geographical information systems
• multimedia information systems

We encourage submission of papers that report on theoretical advances in these core areas, as well as papers that deal with some practical insights resulting from experiments and/or implementations.

You will find more information about the preparation of papers at the official EUSFLAT 2013 webpage (under the item Call for Papers). Please, do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Dates and deadlines will be the same of EUSFLAT 2013. These are the following:

Paper Submission: March 1st, 2013
Notification: May 1st, 2013
Final Paper Due: June 15th, 2013
Conference Date: September 11th-13th, 2013