F-cube factory: A fuzzy OLAP system for supporting imprecision
The special needs of the OLAP technology were the main cause of the use of a multidimensional view of the data. Crisp models are not suitable to model complex or non well defined domains. They also fail to integrate data from semi/non-structured sources (e.g. Internet) or with incompatibilities in their schemata. In these situations, as a result of the modelling and/or integration, imprecision appears. So, we need a model able to manage imprecision in the structures and data. If we want to use expert's knowledge in the analysis, we have to keep in mind that expert users are more comfortable when they use linguistic expressions instead of exact values. In this paper we present an extension of a fuzzy multidimensional model to support the use of linguistic labels in the definition of the hierarchies and the OLAP system that implements this model.
olap imprecision multidimensional model linguistic label