This book offers a multifaceted perspective on fuzzy set theory, discussing its developments over the last 50 years. It reports on all types of fuzzy sets, from ordinary to hesitant fuzzy sets, with each one explained by its own developers, authoritative scientists well known for their previous works. Highlighting recent theorems and proofs, the book also explores how fuzzy set theory has come to be extensively used in almost all branches of science, including the health sciences, decision science, earth science and the social sciences alike. It presents a wealth of real-world sample applications, from routing problem to robotics, and from agriculture to engineering. By offering a comprehensive, timely and detailed portrait of the field, the book represents an excellent reference guide for researchers, lecturers and postgraduate students pursuing research on new fuzzy set extensions.

"Computer and Information Sciences" is a unique and comprehensive review of advanced technology and research in the field of Information Technology. It provides an up to date snapshot of research in Europe and the Far East (Hong Kong, Japan and China) in the most active areas of information technology, including Computer Vision, Data Engineering, Web Engineering, Internet Technologies, Bio-Informatics and System Performance Evaluation Methodologies.

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Professor Ashley Morris who passed away some two years ago. Ashley was a close friend of all of us, the editors of this volume, and was also a Ph.D. student of one of us. We all had a chance to not only fully appreciate, and be inspired by his contributions, which have had a considerable impact on the entire research community. Due to our personal relations with Ashley, we also had an opportunity to get familiar with his deep thinking about the areas of his expertise and interests. Ashley has been involved since the very beginning of his professional career in database research and practice. Notably, he introduced first some novel solution in database management systems that could handle imprecise and uncertain data, and flexible queries based on imprecisely specified user interests. He proposed to use for that purpose fuzzy logic as an effective and efficient tool. Later the interests of Ashley moved to ways of how to represent and manipulate more complicated databases involving spatial or temporal objects. In this research he discovered and pursued the power of Geographic Information Systems (GISs).

These two main lines of Ashley 's research interests and contributions are reflected in the composition of this volume. Basically, we collected some significant papers by well known researchers and scholars on the above mentioned topics. The particular contributions will now be briefly summarized to help the reader get a view of the topics covered and the contents of the particular contributions.

Some recent fuzzy database modeling advances for the non-traditional applications are introduced in this book. The focus is on database models for modeling complex information and uncertainty at the conceptual, logical, physical design levels and from integrity constraints defined on the fuzzy relations.
The database models addressed here are; the conceptual data models, including the ExIFO and ExIFO2 data models, the logical database models, including the extended NF2 database model, fuzzy object-oriented database model, and the fuzzy deductive object-oriented database model. Integrity constraints are defined on the fuzzy relations are also addressed. A continuing reason for the limited adoption of fuzzy database systems has been performance. There have been few efforts at defining physical structures that accomodate fuzzy information. A new access structure and data organization for fuzzy information is introduced in this book.

This book offers a multifaceted perspective on fuzzy set theory, discussing its developments over the last 50 years. It reports on all types of fuzzy sets, from ordinary to hesitant fuzzy sets, with each one explained by its own developers, authoritative scientists well known for their previous works. Highlighting recent theorems and proofs, the book also explores how fuzzy set theory has come to be extensively used in almost all branches of science, including the health sciences, decision science, earth science and the social sciences alike. It presents a wealth of real-world sample applications, from routing problem to robotics, and from agriculture to engineering. By offering a comprehensive, timely and detailed portrait of the field, the book represents an excellent reference guide for researchers, lecturers and postgraduate students pursuing research on new fuzzy set extensions.

Some recent fuzzy database modeling advances for the non-traditional applications are introduced in this book. The focus is on database models for modeling complex information and uncertainty at the conceptual, logical, physical design levels and from integrity constraints defined on the fuzzy relations.
The database models addressed here are; the conceptual data models, including the ExIFO and ExIFO2 data models, the logical database models, including the extended NF2 database model, fuzzy object-oriented database model, and the fuzzy deductive object-oriented database model. Integrity constraints are defined on the fuzzy relations are also addressed. A continuing reason for the limited adoption of fuzzy database systems has been performance. There have been few efforts at defining physical structures that accomodate fuzzy information. A new access structure and data organization for fuzzy information is introduced in this book.

Computer and Information Sciences is a unique and comprehensive review of advanced technology and research in the field of Information Technology. It provides an up to date snapshot of research in Europe and the Far East (Hong Kong, Japan and China) in the most active areas of information technology, including Computer Vision, Data Engineering, Web Engineering, Internet Technologies, Bio-Informatics and System Performance Evaluation Methodologies.

We are facing an immense growth of digital data and information resources, both in terms of size, complexity, modalities and intrusiveness. Almost every aspect of our existence is being digitally captured. This is exemplified by the omnipresent existence of all kinds of data storage, far beyond those stored in traditional relational databases. The spectrum of data being digitally stored runs from multimedia data repositories to your purchases in most stores. Every tweet that you broadcast is captured for posterity. Needless to say this situation posses new research opportunities, challenges and problems in the ways we store, manipulate, search, and - in general - make use of such data and information. Attempts to cope with these problems have been emerging all over the world with thousands of people devoted to developing tools and techniques to deal with this new area of research. One of the prominent scholars and researchers in this field was the late Professor Ashley Morris who died suddenly and tragically at a young age. Ashley's career begun in industry, where he specialized in databases.

The International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS) brought together researchers and practitioners from all over the world to - change ideas and experiences on their recent research in all areas of the c- puter and information sciences. This year, the 18th ISCIS was organized by the Department of Computer Engineering at the Middle East Technical University, and was held in Antalya, Turkey. This year was the ?rst in which the proceedings of ISCIS were published in the LNCS series by Springer-Verlag. The proceedings include 135 papers that were selected by the program committee from over 360 contributions submitted from 25 di?erent countries. Thesymposiumthisyearcoveredthefollowingtopicsinthecomputerand- formationsciences: architecturesandsystems, computersciencetheory, databases and information retrieval, e-business, graphics and computer vision, intelligent systemsandrobotics, multimedia, networksandsecurity, parallelanddistributed computing, soft computing, and software engineering. The support from the following institutions is deeply appreciated: - METU (Middle East Technical University) ] ? - TUBITAK (Scienti?c and Technical Research Council of Turkey) - IEEE, Turkey Section - IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) I must also express my sincere thanks to all the people who contributed their time and great e?ort to make the symposium possible. My very special thanks ? go to the organizing committee, namely Semra Do? ganda? g, Sertan Girgin, Ismail ] Ozturk, ] Ahmet Sa, can and Cevat S, ener, who did very active and endless work and put tremendous e?ort into the symposium. I also thank many other c- leagues for their special contributions to the symposium.

This volume contains the papers presented at the Eleventh Flexible Query Answering Systems 2015 (FQAS-2015) held on October 26-28, 2015 in Cracow, Poland. The international conferences on Flexible Query Answering Systems (FQAS) are a series of premier conferences focusing on the key issue in the information society of providing easy, flexible, and intuitive access to information and knowledge to everybody, even people with a very limited computer literacy. In targeting this issue, the Conference draws on several research areas, such as information retrieval, database management, information filtering, knowledge representation, soft computing, management of multimedia information, and human-computer interaction. The Conference provides a unique opportunity for researchers, developers and practitioners to explore new ideas and approaches in a multidisciplinary forum.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems, FQAS 2011, held in Roskilde, Denmark, in October 2011. The 43 papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on logical approaches to flexible querying, fuzzy logic in spatial and temporal data modeling and querying, knowledge-based approaches, multimedia, data fuzziness, reliability and trust, information retrieval, preference queries, flexible querying of graph data, ranking, ordering and statistics, query recommendation and interpretation, as well as on fuzzy databases and applications (8 papers presented in a special session).