This is the first volume of a two-volume set of papers dedicated to the memory of Zdzislaw Pawlak. The second volume was previously reviewed in Computing Reviews [1]. There are 24 papers in this volume, three of which emphasize the scientific biography and personal recollections that the contributors had of Pawlak. The remaining 21 are technical. The first volume has the same preface as the second volume. The preface lists and provides a brief description of each paper in both volumes. The structure is rather loose in that there is no further thematic clustering of papers after the initial biographical chapters.

Zdzislaw Pawlak was the inventor of the concept of rough sets. Rough sets (and the complementary ideas of fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic) seek to deal with the inherent imprecision in the definition and understanding of the concepts and classification of data. Historically, mathematics and philosophy have treated information, data, and concepts as precise entities. However, in practice this assumption fails. They are recognized to be vague and imprecise. The theory of rough sets enables rigorous discussion of imprecise notions and quantities.

There are three chapters focusing on Zdzislaw Pawlak, the man. The first chapter is a detailed scientific biography of Pawlak that emphasizes his innovativeness in tackling problems in database systems and computer architecture in the comparative isolation of an Eastern European laboratory during the Cold War. Rough sets arose from his work on database systems. From that point, investigations in the theory and applications of rough sets took off in Poland and, especially, in China. Pawlak established research in artificial intelligence in Poland. This biography also describes Pawlak’s personality--his love of the outdoors and of painting, his self-effacing generosity of spirit, and the respect that his colleagues and students had for him. The second chapter is a chronological list of his papers, books, and reports. The fourth chapter, by Victor Marek, is also biographical and describes Pawlak’s investigations into database systems that were the seed bed of the theory of rough sets.

The third chapter, on the theory of rough sets, by Nguyen and Skowron is a general overview that starts at the fundamentals of rough sets and concludes with topics that are currently at the frontier of research. This chapter is the longest in the book at 80 pages. Despite its length, it is still only a preliminary survey, but the number of references (394) should enable more in-depth study.

Describing the remaining 20 chapters in the volume individually is not feasible. Some are longer reports of complete projects; others are brief descriptions of works-in-progress. Here is a selection that may represent the breadth of topics included in this volume.

The adaptation and evolution of the properties and components of rough sets is a theme of several papers such as “Dynamic Programming Approach for Exact Decision Rule Optimization,” by Amin, Chikalov, Moshkov, and Zielosko, and “Approaches for Updating Approximations in Set-Valued Information Systems While Objects and Attributes Vary with Time,” by Chen, Li, and Tian. Applications in art and music appear in two papers: “Music Information Retrieval in Music Repositories,” by Bozena Kostek, in which musical items are retrieved according to musical content in MPEG format, and “How Near Are Zdzislaw Pawlak’s Paintings?” by James F. Peters, who applied rough set theory in analyzing Pawlak’s artistic technique in his own paintings. Rough set theory was implemented in DNA programming in a paper by Kim, Watada, and Pedrycz, “DNA Rough-Set Computing in the Development of Decision Rule Reducts,” that is as much biochemistry as rough sets. An application in political science is discussed in the paper “Towards a Comprehensive Similarity Analysis of Voting Procedures Using Rough Sets and Similarity Measures” by Kacprzyk, Nurmi, and Zadrozny. Logic on rough sets is emphasized in two papers: “Three-Valued Logic for Reasoning about Covering-Based Rough Sets,” by Beata Konikowska, and “Logic-Based Roughification,” by Nguyen and Szalas. Kahn and Banerjee propose an algebra for rough sets in their more inclusive “Algebras for Information Systems.”

Each chapter has its own set of references. There is a brief topical index at the end of the volume. The style of writing is at a very sophisticated level consistent with the companion second volume of the pair. The target readership is the specialist in the theory and applications of rough sets.