A framework of fuzzy triggers for XML database systems

Triggers have played an important role in integrity constraint management for relational database systems. More research projects and commercial systems are working on supporting triggers in XML database systems in recent years. This paper describes our approach to incorporate fuzziness into XML triggers. By adding a thin layer to an existing database, fuzzy expressions can be used within triggers to specify application level constraints declaratively. Our system provides support to fuzziness over traditional XML databases, while the underlying XML data remains crisp. As a result, any existing application will not be affected and is not required to be altered when using our approach. To the best of our knowledge, this is the only research reported to support fuzzy triggers in XML database systems. This paper describes the language of the fuzzy trigger, the system architecture, and the implementation with a motivating example.