This volume offers the advice of selected expert contributors on the application of heterogeneous methods for managing uncertainty and imprecision in databases. It contains both survey chapters on classic topics such as "flexible querying in databases", and up to date information on "database models to represent imperfect data". Further, it includes specific contributions on uncertainty management in database integration, and in representing and querying semistructured and spatial data.

Advances in Knowledge Representation offers a compilation of state of the art research works on topics such as concept theory, positive relational algebra and k-relations, structured, visual and ontological models of knowledge representation, as well as detailed descriptions of applications to various domains, such as semantic representation and extraction, intelligent information retrieval, program proof checking, complex planning, and data preparation for knowledge modelling, and a extensive bibliography. It is a valuable contribution to the advancement of the field. The expected readers are advanced students and researchers on the knowledge representation field and related areas; it may also help to computer oriented practitioners of diverse fields looking for ideas on how to develop a knowledge-based application.

This book comprises a selection of papers from IFSA 2007 on new methods and theories that contribute to the foundations of fuzzy logic and soft computing. Coverage includes the application of fuzzy logic and soft computing in flexible querying, philosophical and human-scientific aspects of soft computing, search engine and information processing and retrieval, as well as intelligent agents and knowledge ant colony.

This book covers in a great depth the fast growing topic of tools, techniques and applications of soft computing (e.g., fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, neural networks, rough sets, Bayesian networks, and other probabilistic techniques) in the ontologies and the Semantic Web. The author shows how components of the Semantic Web (like the RDF, Description Logics, ontologies) can be covered with a soft computing methodology.

This book presents the most recent advances in fuzzy clustering techniques and their applications. The contents include Introduction to Fuzzy Clustering; Fuzzy Clustering based Principal Component Analysis; Fuzzy Clustering based Regression Analysis; Kernel based Fuzzy Clustering; Evaluation of Fuzzy Clustering; Self-Organized Fuzzy Clustering. This book is directed to the computer scientists, engineers, scientists, professors and students of engineering, science, computer science, business, management, avionics and related disciplines.

This book explores non-extensive statistical mechanics in non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and presents an overview of the strong nonlinearity of chaos and complexity in natural systems, drawing on relevant mathematics from topology, measure-theory, inverse and ill-posed problems, set-valued analysis, and nonlinear functional analysis. It offers a self-contained theory of complexity and complex systems as the steady state of non-equilibrium systems, denoting a homeostatic dynamic equilibrium between stabilizing order and destabilizing disorder.

This book presents recent developments in automatic text analysis. Providing an overview of linguistic modeling, it collects contributions of authors from a multidisciplinary area that focus on the topic of automatic text analysis from different perspectives. It includes chapters on cognitive modeling and visual systems modeling, and contributes to the computational linguistic and information theoretical grounding of automatic text analysis.

Images have always been very important in human life. Their applications range from primitive communication between humans of all ages to advanced technologies in the industrial, medical and military field. The increased possibilities to capture and analyze images have contributed to the largeness that the scientific field of "image processing" has become today. Many techniques are being applied, including soft computing. "Soft Computing in Image Processing: Recent Advances" follows the edited volumes "Fuzzy Techniques in Image Processing" (volume 52, published in 2000) and "Fuzzy Filters for Image Processing" (volume 122, published in 2003), and covers a wide range of both practical and theoretical applications of soft computing in image processing. The 16 excellent chapters of the book have been grouped into five parts: Applications in Remote Sensing, Applications in Image Retrieval, Applications in Image Analysis, Other Applications, and Theoretical Contributions. The focus of the book is on practical applications, which makes it interesting for every researcher that is involved with soft computing, image processing, or both scientific branches.

This book is both a reference for engineers and scientists and a teaching resource, featuring tutorial chapters and research papers on feature extraction. Until now there has been insufficient consideration of feature selection algorithms, no unified presentation of leading methods, and no systematic comparisons.

This volume offers a general view of recent conceptual developments of Soft Computing (SC). It presents successful new applications of SC to real-world problems leading to better performance than "traditional" methods. The edited volume covers a wide spectrum of applications including areas such as: robotic dynamic systems, non-linear plants, manufacturing systems, and time series prediction.