Representing and processing fuzzy information - an XML-based approach

Fuzzy approaches to improve decision making within business applications are widely spread. However, these solutions are often restricted to special areas, and are less than fully integrated into company-wide business application systems. We propose to use a common way to represent fuzzy information to soften this lack of integration. In this paper, we introduce a formal syntax for important fuzzy data types used to store fuzzy information. We make this syntax operatable by defining appropriate document type definitions (DTD), and we show how fuzzy information, whose description is based on these DTDs, can be exchanged between application systems by means of the extensible markup language (XML). With this, we give an approach to a better integration of business applications using fuzzy approaches into company-wide business application systems. This allows for a better collaboration of application systems and development tools, which use fuzzy approaches or which are intended to develop fuzzy approaches, in general. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.