A Framework for Expressing and Combining Preferences Rakesh Agrawal and Edward L. Wimmers View Paper (PDF) Return to Research Sessions Abstract The advent of the World Wide Web has created an explosion in the available on-line information. As the range of potential choices expand, the time and effort required to sort through them also expands. We propose a formal framework for expressing and combining user preferences to address this problem. Preferences can be used to focus search queries and to order the search results. A preference is expressed by the user for an entity which is described by a set of named fields; each field can take on values from a certain type. The * symbol may be used to match any element of that type. A set of preferences can be combined using a generic combine operator which is instantiated with a value function, thus providing a great deal of flexibility. Same preferences can be combined in more than one way and a combination of preferences yields another preference thus providing the closure property. We demonstrate the power of our framework by illustrating how a currently popular personalization system and a real-life application can be realized as special cases of our framework. We also discuss implementation of the framework in a relational setting. References Note: References link to DBLP on the Web. [Arr50] ... [BP96] ... [EHJ+96] Oren Etzioni , Steve Hanks , Tao Jiang , Richard M. Karp , Omid Madani , Orli Waarts : Efficient Information Gathering on the Internet (extended abstract). FOCS 1996 : 234-243 [Fag98] Ronald Fagin : Fuzzy Queries in Multimedia Database Systems. PODS 1998 : 1-10 [FISS98] ... [HS99] ... [LG99] ... [RV97] Paul Resnick , Hal R. Varian : Recommender Systems - Introduction to the Special Section. CACM 40(3) : 56-58(1997) [SM83] Gerard Salton , Michael McGill : Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval. McGraw-Hill Book Company 1984, ISBN 0-07-054484-0 BIBTEX @inproceedings{DBLP:conf/sigmod/AgrawalW00,   author    = {Rakesh Agrawal and                 Edward L. Wimmers},    editor    = {Weidong Chen and                 Jeffrey F. Naughton and                 Philip A. Bernstein},    title     = {A Framework for Expressing and Combining Preferences},    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2000 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on                 Management of Data, May 16-18, 2000, Dallas, Texas, USA},    journal   = {SIGMOD Record},    publisher = {ACM},    volume    = {29},    number    = {2},    year      = {2000},    isbn      = {1-58113-218-2},    pages     = {297-306},    crossref  = {DBLP:conf/sigmod/2000},    bibsource = {DBLP, http://dblp.uni-trier.de} } }, DiSC'01 Copyright ©2002 ACM Inc.