ABSTRACT
More and more scientific and engineering applications make use of intelligent soft computing (SC) information systems. Hence, the SC framework is put into effect by hybrid systems combining two or more of the constituent technologies with complementary characteristics. The term SC refers to a family of computing techniques that originally comprised four different partners: fuzzy logic, evolutionary computation, neural networks and probabilistic reasoning. The term SC distinguishes these techniques from hard computing that is considered less flexible and computationally demanding. We live in a world that is becoming increasingly mobile and service-oriented, and our information systems must support new forms of interaction and collaboration. There is increased emphasis on the search, acquisition, interchange and sharing of data, information and knowledge. Advances in knowledge discovery and data mining, neural networks, genetic algorithms as well as in intelligent agents and intelligent temporal databases have made this possible.
