Ontology-Based Database Approach for Handling Preferences - Data Warehousing Design and Advanced Engineering Applications - page 272

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS Personalisation: is tailoring a consumer

product, electronic or written medium to a user
based on personal details or characteristics they
provide. More recently, it has especially been
applied in the context of the World Wide Web
(Wikipedia).
Ontology: a formal and consensual dictionary
of categories and properties of entities of a domain
and the relationships that hold among them.
User Preferences: a set of criterions allowing
for a specific user to measure the relevance of
given information and to evaluate whether a given
information is more relevant that another

Ontology-Based Database (OBDB): is a data
source which contains i) a (local) ontology, ii)
possibly some references from this ontology to
external (shared) ontologies, iii) a set of data, iv)
and finally a relationship between each data and
the ontological notion which explicit its meaning.
An OBDB has two main characteristics: i) both
ontologies and data are represented in a unique
database and the same processing can be applied
on them (Insert, Update, Querying, Versioning,
etc.); ii) any data is associated to an ontological
element which defines it meaning and vice versa
(Dehainsala et al., 2007).
EXPRESS Language: defined in ISO 10303
Part 11, is a data modelling language that provides
a rich set of facilities for defining complex data
types. It combines ideas from the entity-attribute
and the Object-Oriented modelling approaches.