Flexible Query Answering Systems: Recent Advances Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems, FQAS’ 2000, ... (Advances in Intelligent and Soft Computing)

The series of Online World Conferences on Soft Computing (WSC) is organized by the World Federation of Soft Computing (WFSC) and has become an established annual event in the academic calendar and was already held for the 8th time in 2003. Starting as a small workshop held at Nagoya University, Japan in 1994 it has - tured to the premier online event on soft computing in industrial applications. It has been hosted by the universities of Granada, Spain, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, Berlin, Cran?eld University, Helsinki University of Technology and Nagoya University. The goal of WFSC is to promote soft computing across the world, by using the internet as a forum for virtual technical discussion and publishing at no cost to authors and participants. The of?cial journal of the World Federation on Soft Computing is the journal Applied Soft Computing. The 8th WSC Conference (WSC8) took place from September 29th to October 10th, 2003. Registered participants had the opportunity to follow and discuss the online presentations of authors from all over the world. Out of more than 60 subm- sions the program committee had accepted 27 papers for ?nal presentation at WSC8.

These proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems covers the whole array of fields related to users posing flexible queries and (electronic) systems producing answers. The FQAS 2000 Conference has been the premier conference focusing on one of the key issues the information society is facing, namely that of providing easy, flexible, intuitive access to information to everybody. In targeting this issue, the conference draws on several research areas such as databases, querying, information retrieval, knowledge representation, soft computing, cyberspace, multimedia systems, human-computer interaction.
This volume provides a unique opportunity for researchers, developers and practitioners to explore new ideas and approaches in a multidisciplinary forum.

"This book covers a wide range of application areas of soft computing like optimization, data analysis and data mining, fault diagnosis, control as well as traffic and transportation systems. It contains 25 revised contributions from the 8th Online World Conferences on Soft Computing (WSC8). The collected papers show how the major soft computing techniques, fuzzy systems, neural networks and evolutionary algorithms and especially hybrid systems combining methods from these fields, lead to successful industrial applications. The reader will find an interesting, inspiring and wide variety of soft computing techniques and applications in this book."--Résumé de l'éditeur "This book covers a wide range of application areas of soft computing like optimization, data analysis and data mining, fault diagnosis, control as well as traffic and transportation systems. It contains 25 revised contributions from the 8th Online World Conferences on Soft Computing (WSC8). The collected papers show how the major soft computing techniques, fuzzy systems, neural networks and evolutionary algorithms and especially hybrid systems combining methods from these fields, lead to successful industrial applications. The reader will find an interesting, inspiring and wide variety of soft computing techniques and applications in this book."--Jacket Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems, FQAS'2000, October, 25-28, Warsaw, Poland Data warehousing has nowadays become a common technology.