Querying with Preferences in a Digital Library [chapter]

Nicolas Spyratos, Vassilis Christophides
2006 Lecture Notes in Computer Science  
We consider a collection of federated sources of the web, and a community of users that are interested in documents residing in one or more among the federated sources. The search for documents of interest is supported by a mediator that we call a digital library. The library simply indexes all documents that are made available to users by the federated sources. When a user addresses a query to the library, the library returns the URLs of documents satisfying the query. In such a context, one
more » ... the factors influencing user satisfaction is the size of the answer set when it is either too small (few or no documents), or too large (several hundreds or thousands of documents). In this paper, we address the problem of too large answer sets and we call personalized query a usual query together with (a) an upper bound on the number of documents returned and (b) a set of preferences as to the order in which the returned documents should be presented to the user; both these parameters are defined by the user online, during query formulation time. The main contribution of the paper is to propose a framework in which the problem can be stated formally, and a method for the evaluation of personalized queries. This work is partially supported by the EU Network of Excellence in Digital Libraries
doi:10.1007/11605126_8 fatcat:2lyz6hvsbjgkrkq24nybjl5uwi