Being the de-facto standard for data representation and exchange over the Web,
XML (Extensible Markup Language) allows the easy development of applications
that exchange data over the Web. This creates a set of data management
requirements involving XML. XML and related standards have been extensively
applied in many business, service, and multimedia applications. As a result, a
large volume of data is managed today directly in XML format.
With the wide and in-depth utilization of XML in diverse application domains,
some particularities of data management in concrete applications emerge, which
challenge current XML technology. This is very similar with the situation that
some database models and special database systems have been developed so that
databases can satisfy the need of managing diverse data well. In data- and
knowledge- intensive application systems, one of the challenges can be
generalized as the need to handle imprecise and uncertain information in XML
data management by applying fuzzy logic, probability, and more generally soft
computing. Currently, two kinds of situations are roughly identified in soft
computing for XML data management: applying soft computing for the intelligent
processing of classical XML data; applying soft computing for the representation
and processing of imprecise and uncertain XML data. For the former, soft
computing can be used for flexible query of XML document as well as XML data
mining, XML duplicate detection, and so on. Additionally, it is crucial for Webbased
intelligent information systems to explicitly represent and process imprecise
and uncertain XML data with soft computing. This is because XML has been
extensively applied in many application domains which may have a big deal of
imprecision and vagueness. Imprecise and uncertain data can be found, for
example, in the integration of data sources and data generation with nontraditional
means (e.g., automatic information extraction and data acquirement by sensor and
RFID). Also XML has been an important component of the Semantic Web
framework, and the Semantic Web provides Web data with well-defined meaning,
enabling computers and people to better work in cooperation