Supporting stratum access for fuzzy queries

This paper addresses the problem of retrieving query results by fuzzy association. Many works have studied applications that associate multiple objects by "fuzzy" (or "soft") conditions. For example, in heterogeneous data integration, similar name constants referring to the same entity are joined by the fuzzy notion of similarity, as they can differ in subtle ways (e.g., "Jane Smith" and "J. Smith"). Similarly, in spatial queries, two objects are joined by the fuzzy measure of the distance between the two. However, these works are specific solely to the specific target scenarios. This paper thus models representative access methods and formalizes this problem of supporting fuzzy associations in general, to unify existing applications of varying scenarios and even unstudied applications. Further, we propose optimal algorithms that uniformly apply to varying access methods across applications.