A Migration Approach from Crisp Databases to Fuzzy Databases

Abstract

Fuzzy databases (DB) have been introduced to deal with uncertain or incomplete information in many applications demonstrating the efficiency of processing fuzzy queries. For these reasons, many organizations aim to integrate the flexible querying, to handle imprecise data or to use fuzzy data mining tools, minimizing the transformation costs. The best solution is to offer a smoothly migration toward this technology. This paper presents a new approach for the migration from relational DB (RDB) towards fuzzy relational DB (FRDB). The goal of this migration is to permit an easy mapping of the existing data, schemas and programs, while integrating the different fuzzy concepts. This paper presents two migration strategies. The first one, named "partial migration", is useful to introduce fuzzy queries in RDB without changing existing data. The "total migration" is the second migration strategy which offers in addition to the flexible querying, the possibility to store imprecise data. This strategy requires a modification of schemas, data and eventually programs.