Combining Fuzzy Information from Multiple Systems

In a traditional database system, the result of a query is a set of values (those values that satisfy the query). In other data servers, such as a system with queries based on image content, or many text retrieval systems, the result of a query is a sorted list. For example, in the case of a system with queries based on image content, the query might ask for objects that are a particular shade of red, and the result of the query would be a sorted list of objects in the database, sorted by how well the color of the object matches that given in the query. A multimedia system must somehow synthesize both types of queries (those whose result is a set and those whose result is a sorted list) in a consistent manner. In this paper we discuss the solution adopted by Garlic, a multimedia information system being developed at the IBM Almaden Research Center. This solution is based on ``graded' ' (or ``fuzzy'') sets. Issues of efficient query evaluation in a multimedia system are very different from those in a traditional database system. This is because th