Lossless Join Decomposition for Extended Possibility-Based Fuzzy Relational Databases

Abstract

Functional dependency is the basis of database normalization. Various types of fuzzy functional dependencies have been proposed for fuzzy relational database and applied to the process of database normalization. However, the problem of achieving lossless join decomposition occurs when employing the fuzzy functional dependencies to database normalization in an extended possibility-based fuzzy data models. To resolve the problem, this study defined fuzzy functional dependency based on a notion of approximate equality for extended possibility-based fuzzy relational databases. Examples show that the notion is more applicable than other similarity concept to the research related to the extended possibility-based data model. We provide a decomposition method of using the proposed fuzzy functional dependency for database normalization and prove the lossless join property of the decomposition method.