Relevance in systems having a fuzzy‐set‐based semantics

Future automated question answering systems will typically involve the use of local knowledge available on the users' systems as well as knowledge retrieved from the Web. The determination of what information we should seek out on the Web must be directed by its potential value or relevance to our objective in the light of what knowledge is already available. Here we begin to provide a formal quantification of the concept of relevance and related ideas for systems that use fuzzy‐set‐based representations to provide the underlying semantics. We also introduce the idea of ease of extraction to quantify the ability of extracting relevant information from complex relationships. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 22: 385–396, 2007.