Protoforms of Linguistic Database Summaries as a Tool for Human-Consistent Data Mining

The authors considered first the linguistic data (base) summaries in the sense of Yager, exemplified by, for a personnel database, "most employees are young and well paid" (with some degree of truth) and their extensions. The authors advocate the use of the concept of a protoform (prototypical form), vividly advocated by Zadeh, as a general form of a linguistic data summary. Then, an extension of the interactive approach to fuzzy linguistic summaries was presented, based on fuzzy logic and fuzzy database queries. This paper showed how fuzzy queries are related to linguistic summaries, and that one can introduce a hierarchy of protoforms, or abstract summaries in the sense of latest Zadeh´s ideas meant mainly for increasing deduction capabilities of search engines. An implementation for a sales database in a computer retailer, employing some type of a protoform of a linguistic summary was shown