The Use of Linguistic Terms in Database Models

Classical database systems have been introduced in the late 50’s and have proved their usefulness in various domains. However, their incompetence to deal with vague and imprecise information, has lead to new data base designs. On the other hand the use of linguistic terms has also shown its usefulness. The assignment of linguistic terms to phenomena in order to describe the characteristics or properties of objects is very natural. People make such assignments every day. A drawback of most new database designs is that often the natural aspect of making assignment is lost. In this paper we introduce a new database model based on quasi-order relations (reflexive and symmetric). The proposed model describes the mathematical background of the assignment of values to database attributes, using the theory of evaluation problems and sets. The constructed model offers an interesting new approach to the theory of database design in combination with linguistic terms.