Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 14
Ontology-Based
Database Approach for
Handling Preferences
Dilek Tapucu
IYTE, Izmir, Turkey
Gayo Diallo
LISI/ENSMA, Poitiers, France
Yamine Ait Ameur
LISI/ENSMA, Poitiers, France
Murat Osman Ünalir
Ege University, Izmir, Turkey
ABSTRACT
Information systems now manage huge amount of data. Users are overwhelmed by the numerous results
provided in response to their requests. These results must often be sorted and filtered in order to be us-
able. Moreover, the “one size its all” approach has shown its limitation for information searching in
many applications, particularly in the e-commerce domain. The capture and exploitation of user pref-
erences have been proposed as a solution to overcome this problem. However, the existing approaches
usually define preferences for a particular application. Thus, it is difficult to share and reuse the handled
preferences in other contexts. In this chapter, we propose a sharable, formal and generic model to rep-
resent user's preferences. The model gathers several preferences models proposed in the Database and
Semantic Web communities. The novelty of our approach is that the defined preferences are attached
to the ontologies which describe the semantic of the data manipulated by the applications. Moreover,
the proposed model offers a persistence mechanism and a dedicated language; it is implemented using
Ontology-Based Databases (OBDB) system extended in order to take into account preferences. OBDB
manage both ontologies and the data instances. The preference model is formally defined using the
EXPRESS data modelling language which ensures us a free ambiguity definition and the approach is
illustrated through a case study in the tourism domain.
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