FUZZY FUNCTIONAL-DEPENDENCIES AND REDUNDANCY ELIMINATION

In the context of regular relational databases, functional dependencie s have received a lot of attention; since they capture some semantics about the data related to redundancy. Functional dependencies lead to an appropriate design of a database in terms of a set of relations and can make the checking process of integrity constraints significantly easier. For about 10 years, several proposals to deal with ill-known i nformation in database management systems have been made, and extensio ns of the relational data model have been proposed accordingly. In thi s context, the idea of fuzzy functional dependency has emerged to exte nd the classical functional dependency, and several definitions have b een proposed. In this article, an overview of these different proposal s is provided, and the connection between fuzzy functional dependencie s and database design is discussed. In addition, some semantics and us e of fuzzy functional dependencies are suggested.