User-Friendly Interface for Introducing Fuzzy Criteria into Expressive Searches

We present a framework that allows any user (without the need of neither technical no theoretical knowledge) to define fuzzy criteria based on the non-fuzzy information stored in databases in an easy way. The interests for developing such a framework is to provide a human-oriented (fuzzy and non-fuzzy) search engine with a user-friendly interface to perform expressive and flexible searches over databases. We achieved this task by providing an intelligent interface for the users to define fuzzy criteria without having any knowledge about its low-level syntax or implementation details. Our framework allows users to pose different queries (combining crisp and fuzzy search criteria) over various conventional and modern data formats such as JSON, SQL, Prolog, CSV, XLS and XLSX. We believe our approach adds to the advancement for more intelligent and human-oriented fuzzy search engines.