A perspective from the Fuzzy Object Data Management Group (FODMG)

The Fuzzy Object Data Management Group has been formed as a joint international collaborative research effort among fuzzy database researchers in order to establish common terminology and concepts, to formalize and integrate the current body of fuzzy object model research, to provide a basis for future extensions, and to contribute to the commercial success of a fuzzy object data model. This paper presents the initial research efforts to use ODMG-93 object data model standard as the basis for defining a fuzzy object data model since it is becoming a defacto standard and several object-oriented database vendors are currently releasing commercial products in compliance with this standard. The syntactic extensions to the ODMG object model and the semantic issues related to these extensions in order to provide fuzzy set objects and fuzzy objects are presented. These extensions are an initial effort in accomplishing the challenging task of defining a fuzzy type and fuzzy hierarchy and their related semantics