Ontology-based database approach for handling preferences

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 usable. Moreover, the "one size fits all" approach has shown its limitation for information searching in many applications, particularly in the e-commerce domain. The capture and exploitation of user preferences 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 represent 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. © 2010, IGI Global