Being the de-facto standard for data representation and exchange over the Web, XML (Extensible Markup Language) allows the easy development of applications that exchange data over the Web. This creates a set of data management requirements involving XML. XML and related standards have been extensively applied in many business, service, and multimedia applications. As a result, a large volume of data is managed today directly in XML format. With the wide and in-depth utilization of XML in diverse application domains, some particularities of data management in concrete applications emerge, which challenge current XML technology. This is very similar with the situation that some database models and special database systems have been developed so that databases can satisfy the need of managing diverse data well. In data- and knowledge- intensive application systems, one of the challenges can be generalized as the need to handle imprecise and uncertain information in XML data management by applying fuzzy logic, probability, and more generally soft computing. Currently, two kinds of situations are roughly identified in soft computing for XML data management: applying soft computing for the intelligent processing of classical XML data; applying soft computing for the representation and processing of imprecise and uncertain XML data. For the former, soft computing can be used for flexible query of XML document as well as XML data mining, XML duplicate detection, and so on.
This book covers in a great depth the fast growing topic of techniques, tools and applications of soft computing in XML data management. It is shown how XML data management (like model, query, integration) can be covered with a soft computing focus. This book aims to provide a single account of current studies in soft computing approaches to XML data management. The objective of the book is to provide the state of the art information to researchers, practitioners, and graduate students of the Web intelligence, and at the same time serving the information technology professional faced with non-traditional applications that make the application of conventional approaches difficult or impossible.
