Fixing inconsistencies of fuzzy spatiotemporal XML data

Fuzzy spatiotemporal data models have been used to support spatial and temporal knowledge representation and reasoning in the presence of fuzziness. In the meantime, XML is expected to become the next generation standard language for exchanging data over the Internet, which will become a trend to represent fuzzy spatiotemporal data based on XML. However, fuzzy spatiotemporal XML documents may contain inconsistencies violating predefined spatial and temporal constraints, which cause the data inconsistency problems. Although those consistency problems in XML documents have been widely studied, their studies only take the general data into account, and the studies on consistencies of fuzzy spatiotemporal data are still open issues. In this paper we put forward solutions to the problems of inconsistencies in fuzzy spatiotemporal XML documents. We also analyze inconsistent states which are named discontinuity overlap or cycle of the temporal labels of some incoming edges. Then, we put forward the corresponding approaches to checking and fixing fuzzy spatiotemporal XML documents according to the inconsistent states. Finally, the experimental results show that our proposed algorithms can fix inconsistencies of fuzzy spatiotemporal XML documents significantly.