Database preference queries—a possibilistic logic approach with symbolic priorities

Abstract

The paper presents a new approach to database preference queries, where preferences are represented in a possibilistic logic manner, using symbolic weights. The symbolic weights may be processed without assessing their precise value, which leaves the freedom for the user to not specify any priority among the preferences. The user may also enforce a (partial) ordering between them, if necessary. The approach can be related to the processing of fuzzy queries whose components are conditionally weighted in terms of importance. In this paper, importance levels are symbolically processed, and refinements of both Pareto ordering and minimum ordering are used. The representational power of the proposed setting is stressed, while the approach is compared with database Best operator-like methods and with the CP-net approach developed in artificial intelligence. The paper also provides a structured and rather broad overview of the different lines of research in the literature dealing with the handling of preferences in database queries.

Conditional Preference Nets and Possibilistic Logic

“…Its use with symbolic weights for approximating acyclic Boolean CP-nets [2] and TCP-nets [12], has been discussed in [6,7,13]. Then, a representation of CP-net has been proposed using the symmetric Pareto order in [8,9], and recalled in [10,14] using leximin order. This representation has been presented as being faithful in the general case (without providing the proof).…”

Fuzziness in database management systems: Half a century of developments and future prospects

“…For example, we refer the interested reader to the following works which are not the source papers on the above types of queries but consider them in a fuzzy/possibilistic setting: [13,32,35,72,74,82,94,95,99,105].…”

A Possibilistic Logic Approach to Conditional Preference Queries

“…CP-nets are underlain by a ceteris paribus principle that amounts to giving priority to preferences attached to parent nodes over preferences attached to children nodes in the CP-net structure. Besides, it has been noticed that a CP-net ordering can be approximated by a possibilistic logic representation with symbolic weights [19,8]. The priority in favor of father nodes carries over to the possibilistic setting in the following way.…”

“…Its potential use for dealing with preference queries has even been stressed [7]. Besides, the use of possibilistic logic for the modeling of preferences queries has been advocated more recently [8,9].…”