Problems and Prospects in Fuzzy Data Analysis

In meeting the challenges that resulted from the explosion of collected, stored, and transferred data, Knowledge Discovery in Databases or Data Mining has emerged as a new research area. However, the ap- proaches studied in this area have mainly been oriented towards highly structured and precise data. In addition, the goal to obtain understand- able results is often neglected. Therefore we suggest concentrating on In- formation Mining, i.e. the analysis of heterogeneous information sources with the main aim of producing comprehensible results. Since the aim of fuzzy technology has always been to model linguistic information and to achieve understandable solutions, we expect it to play an important role in information mining.