Information engineering and fuzzy logic

Information engineering constitutes a variety of tasks related to: 1) information processing (data clarification, enhancing, classification, fusion, summarization, and modelling); 2) information retrieving (through querying and reasoning); and 3) information exploitation (for making decision, designing and optimizing). These tasks are becoming increasingly important with the confluence of computer and communication technologies, e.g. on the Internet. Fuzzy set methods offer useful tools for handling these tasks due to their ability to provide a qualitative interface with data and to model graded notions such as uncertainty, preference and similarity, which play a key role in reasoning and decision. We discuss how fuzzy set techniques can contribute to most of the information engineering tasks due to the fuzzy set representation capabilities and their computational facilities. The paper emphasizes the centrality of information and points out the role of fuzzy sets in different information engineering tasks and application areas