Premium
Relational Representation of Uncertain and Imprecise Time Assessments: An Application to Artworks Dating
Author(s) -
Medina Juan Miguel,
Pons Olga,
Vila María Amparo
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
international journal of intelligent systems
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.291
H-Index - 87
eISSN - 1098-111X
pISSN - 0884-8173
DOI - 10.1002/int.21914
Subject(s) - representation (politics) , computer science , artificial intelligence , natural language processing , law , politics , political science
Imprecision and uncertainty appear together in many situations of real life and therefore soft computing techniques must be studied to tackle this problem. Imprecise and uncertain values are usually expressed by means of linguistic terms, especially when they have been provided by a human being. This is also the case of temporal information where, in addition to handling time constraints, we may also have both uncertainty and imprecision in the description, like in the sentence “It is very possible that Giotto's Crucifix was painted by 1289.” To manage both uncertainty (very possible) and imprecision (by 1289) in a separate way would lead to a quite complicated computation and a lack of comprehension by the users of the system. Because of these reasons, it is very desirable that both sources of imperfection of time values are combined into a single value that appropriately describes the intended information. In this work, we extend our previous research on this topic and we study how to adapt it to relational systems in order to be useful. The final goal is obtaining normalized fuzzy values that provide an equivalent information about the described temporal fact than the original ones, for making it possible to store and manage them in a fuzzy relational database. On the other hand, there will be some situations where more than one expert opinion about a time period must be taken into account and we need to find a representative value of them all in order to be stored and managed. For the sake of simplicity, comprehensibility, and the efficiency in computation (when using trapezoidal representation), the fuzzy average is used to find such a representative value.