Traditional data repositories introduced for the needs of business
processing, typically focus on the storage and querying of crisp
domains of data. As a result, current commercial data repositories
have no facilities for either storing or querying imprecise/
approximate data.
No significant attempt has been made for a generic and applicationindependent
representation of value imprecision mainly as a
property of axes of analysis and also as part of dynamic
environment, where potential users may wish to define their “own”
axes of analysis for querying either precise or imprecise facts. In
such cases, measured values and facts are characterised by
descriptive values drawn from a number of dimensions, whereas
values of a dimension are organised as hierarchical levels.
A solution named H-IFS is presented that allows the representation
of flexible hierarchies as part of the dimension structures. An
extended multidimensional model named IF-Cube is put forward,
which allows the representation of imprecision in facts and
dimensions and answering of queries based on imprecise
hierarchical preferences. Based on the H-IFS and IF-Cube
concepts, a post relational OLAP environment is delivered, the
implementation of which is DBMS independent and its performance
solely dependent on the underlying DBMS engine
