AskFuzzy (Visual Fuzzy Query Builder)
Imprecision provides a range of freedom in expressing personal and group opinions. It is the common style for expressing opinions in formal and informal daily communications. In general, fuzziness can be specified using one of three alternative approaches, namely manually by the user, semi-automated or fully automated.
In this project, we demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of these alternatives by concentrating on data mining and query coding. In particular, we demonstrate how they can be incorporated in building a user-centric query interface, which is very common application that allows expressing both the input and the output using fuzzy terms. In particular, we demonstrate how they can be incorporated in building a user-centric query interface, which is very common application that allows expressing both the input and the output using fuzzy terms. This is becoming a need in the evolving internet-based era where web-based applications are very common and the number of users accessing structured databases is increasing rapidly. Restricting the user group to only experts in query coding must be avoided. In this regard, we developed a user-friendly visual user interface that facilitates expressing queries using both fuzziness and traditional method. The fuzziness is not expressed explicitly inside the database; fuzziness is absorbed and effectively handled by an intermediate layer which is incorporated between the front-end visual user-interface and the back-end database. All of this has been integrated into the Visual Fuzzy Query Builder which provides a friendly interactive user interface that allows naive end-users to build complex queries via the visual query building interface easily.
The query code will be generated and presented to the users. More advanced users can write their queries using the SQL language inside a query editor. In addition, the Visual Fuzzy Query Builder provides users with all the features required for fuzzily querying a database. It allows users to define their own fuzzy sets for attributes or to change the ranges of fuzzy sets which are automatically generated by the system for specific attributes. The GUI also provides users with a set of tools to build visual diagrams for numeric data in order to get better insight into values and hence to define appropriate fuzzy sets.
TThe Visual Fuzzy Query Builder integrates two open source Eclipse plug-ins in its implementation to help the users in visually build queries that include fuzzy predicates in their conditions:
Director
Coordinators
Keivan Kianmehr
Developers
Keivan Kianmehr, Negar Koochakzadeh, (some other students and research collaborators have minor contributions to VIREX, their names are listed in the papers that describe the part to which they contributed)
Related papers
Related papers are listed under the website of Dr. Reda Alhajj
Copyright
The copyright and proper citation is required if the tool is to be used.
