Fuzzy data analysis: challenges and perspectives

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 approaches studied in this area have mainly been oriented at highly structured and precise data. In addition, the goal to obtain understandable results is often neglected. Therefore we suggest to concentrate on information mining, i.e., the analysis of heterogeneous information sources with the prominent 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.