This book aims to show that fuzzy set theory constitutes a highly expressive framework for modeling preference queries. It presents a study of the algorithmic aspects related to the evaluation of such queries in order to demonstrate that this framework offers a good trade-off between expressivity and efficiency. Numerous examples and proofs are liberally and lucidly demonstrated throughout, and greatly enhance the detailed theoretical aspects explored in the book.
The manipulation of databases is an integral part of a world which is becoming increasingly and pervasively information-focused. This book puts forward a suggestion to advocate preference queries and fuzzy sets as a central concern in database queries and offers an important contribution to the design of intelligent information systems. It provides a comprehensive study on fuzzy preference queries in the context of relational databases. Preference queries, a recent hot topic in database research, provide a basis for rank-ordering the items retrieved, which is especially valuable for large sets of answers.This book aims to show that fuzzy set theory constitutes a highly expressive framework for modeling preference queries. It presents a study of the algorithmic aspects related to the evaluation of such queries in order to demonstrate that this framework offers a good trade-off between expressivity and efficiency. Numerous examples and proofs are liberally and lucidly demonstrated throughout, and greatly enhance the detailed theoretical aspects explored in the book.Researchers working in databases will greatly benefit from this comprehensive and up-to-date study of fuzzy preference queries, and it will also become an invaluable reference point for postgraduate students interested in advanced database techniques.The only other books which deal with this topic are edited books or conference proceedings which include a few contributions about some specific aspects of the question. This book provides a comprehensive view of the issue, starting with basic notions related to relational databases and fuzzy set theory, up to the detailed study of complex fuzzy queries and the way they can be efficiently processed. It is the compendium of more than 20 years of research by the authors who benefit from a great international recognition in the domain of intelligent information systems, on the subject.
The term "hyperdocumentation" is a hyperbole that seems to characterize a paradox. The leading discussions on this topic bring in diverse ideas such as that of data, the fantasy of Big Data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, algorithmic processing, the flow of information and the outstanding successes of disinformation. The purpose of this book is to show that the current context of documentation is just another step in human construction that has been ongoing for not centuries but millennia and which, since the end of the 19th century, has been accelerating. Coined by Paul Otlet in 1934 in his Traite de Documentation, "hyperdocumentation" refers to the concept of documentation that is constantly being expanded and extended in its functionalities and prerogatives. While, according to Otlet, everything could potentially be documented in this way, increasingly we find that it is our lives that are being hyperdocumented. Hyperdocumentation manifests as an increase not only in the quantity of information that is processed but also in its scope, as information is progressively integrated across areas that were previously poorly documented or even undocumented.
A sweeping history of revolutionary struggle and unbreakable alliances, Revolutionary Affinities takes readers from the Paris Commune to the Occupy movement, and through the heart of bloody fratricidal struggles to paint a vivid picture of the greatest anarchist and Marxist figures who dared to join forces, from Louise Michel to Subcomandante Marcos, from Emma Goldman to Walter Benjamin. With the urgent need for a unified front against the far right, there has never been a better time for this inspiring story. Authors Olivier Besancenot and Michael Löwy, two of the foremost voices in the French anti-authoritarian radical left, explore the promises—and challenges—of developing a fully sustainable, libertarian Marxist society by examining questions of political organization, economic policy, radical ecology, and more. Strikingly accessible, brilliantly illuminating, Besancenot and Löwy have given readers more than a history book, they’ve created a road map for the future.
Writer, publisher, war hero, French government minister, André Malraux was renowned as a Renaissance man of the twentieth century. Now, Olivier Todd–author of the acclaimed biography Albert Camus–gives us this life, in which fact competes dramatically with his subject’s previously little-known mythomania. We see the adventurous young Malraux move from 1920s literary Paris to colonial Cambodia, Cochin China, and Spain in its civil war. Todd charts the thrilling exploits that would inspire such novels as Man’s Fate, but, just as fascinating, he also traces Malraux’s lifelong pattern of lies: claiming friendship with Mao, he was called to tutor Nixon, despite having met the Great Helmsman only once; a minor injury becomes in recollections a near-mortal battlefield wound; stories of heroism in the French Resistance omit to mention that Malraux joined up just a few weeks before the Allied landings. With meticulous research, Todd separates myth from reality to throw light on a brilliant con man who would become a national hero, but he also lets us see Malraux’s genuine achievements as both writer and man of action. His real life and the one he embroidered come together in this superb biography to reveal how Malraux, the protean genius, became his own greatest character.
Drawing on personal correspondence, notebooks, and public records never before tapped, as well as interviews with Camus's family, friends, fellow workers, writers, mentors, and lovers, here is the enormously engaging, vibrant, and richly researched biography of the Nobel Prize winning author. Todd shows us a Camus who struggled all his life with irreconcilable conflicts—between his loyalty to family and his passionate nature, between the call to political action and the integrity to his art, between his support of the native Algerians and his identification with the forgotten people, the poor whites. A very private man, Camus could be charming and prickly, sincere and theatrical, genuinely humble, yet full of great ambition. Todd paints a vivid picture of the time and place that shaped Camus—his impoverished childhood in the Algerian city of Belcourt, the sea and the sun and the hot sands that he so loved (he would always feel an exile elsewhere), and the educational system that nurtured him. We see the forces that lured him into communism, and his attraction to the theater and to journalism as outlets for his creativity. The Paris that Camus was inevitably drawn to is one that Todd knows intimately, and he brings alive the war years, the underground activities that Camus was caught up in during the Occupation and the bitter postwar period, as well as the intrigues of the French literati who embraced Camus after his first novel, L'Etranger, was published. Todd is also keenly attuned to the French intellectual climate, and as he takes Camus's measure as a successful novelist, journalist, playwright and director, literary editor, philosopher, he also reveals the temperament in the writer that increasingly isolated him and crippled his reputation in the years before his death and for a long time after. He shows us the solitary man behind the mask—debilitated by continuing bouts of tuberculosis, constantly drawn to irresistible women, and deeply troubled by his political conflicts with the reigning French intellectuals, particularly by the vitriol of his former friend Sartre over the Algerian conflict. Filled with sharp observations and sparkling with telling details, here is a wonderfully human portrait of the Nobel Prize-winning writer, who died at the age of forty-six and who remains one of the most influential literary figures of our time.
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