CALENDAR@IBM.COM (IBM Almaden Research Center Calendar) (11/06/86)
IBM Almaden Research Center
650 Harry Road
San Jose, CA 95120-6099
UNCERTAIN DATA MANAGEMENT
L. A. Zadeh, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley
Computer Science Sem. Wed., Nov. 12 10:00 A.M. Room: Rear Audit.
The issue of data uncertainty has not received much attention in the
literature of database management even though the information resident
in a database is frequently incomplete, imprecise or not totally
reliable. Classical probability-based methods are of limited
effectiveness in dealing with data uncertainty, largely because the
needed joint probabilities are not known. Among the approaches which
are more effective are (a) support logic programming which is
Prolog-based, and (b) probabilistic logic. In our approach,
uncertainty is modeled by (a) allowing the entries in a table to be
set-values or, more generally, to be characterized as possibility
distributions, and (b) interpreting a column as a source of evidence
which may be fused with other columns. This model is closely related
to the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence and provides a conceptually
simple method for dealing with some of the important types of
uncertainty. In its full generality, the problem of uncertain data
management is quite complex and far from solution at this juncture.
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