Foundations of preferences in database systems

  • Authors:
  • Werner Kießling

  • Affiliations:
  • Institute of Computer Science, University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany

  • Venue:
  • VLDB '02 Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Very Large Data Bases
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Personalization of e-services poses new challenges to database technology, demanding a powerful and flexible modeling technique for complex preferences. Preference queries have to be answered cooperatively by treating preferences as soft constraints, attempting a best possible match-making. We propose a strict partial order semantics for preferences, which closely matches people's intuition. A variety of natural and of sophisticated preferences are covered by this model. We show how to inductively construct complex preferences by means of various preference constructors. This model is the key to a new discipline called preference engineering and to a preference algebra. Given the Best-Matches-Only (BMO) query model we investigate how complex preference queries can be decomposed into simpler ones, preparing the ground for divide & conquer algorithms. Standard SQL and XPATH can be extended seamlessly by such preferences (presented in detail in the companion paper [15]). We believe that this model is appropriate to extend database technology towards effective support of personalization.