<P>Database and database systems have become an essential part of everyday life, such as in banking activities, online shopping, or reservations of airline tickets and hotels. These trends place more demands on
the capabilities of future database systems, which need to evolve into decision making systems based on data from multiple sources with varying reliability. In this book a model for the next generation of database systems is
presented. It is demonstrated how to quantize favorable and unfavorable qualitative facts so that they can be stored and processed efficiently, as well as how to use the reliability of the contributing sources in our decision
makings. The concept of a confidence index set (ciset), is introduced in order to mathematically model the above issues. A simple introduction to relational database systems is given allowing anyone with no background in
database theory to appreciate the further contents of this work, especially the extended relational operations and semantics of the ciset relational database model.</P>