Constraint-wish and satisfied-dissatisfied: an overview of two approaches for dealing with bipolar querying

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in dealing with user preferences in flexible database querying, expressing both positive and negative information in a heterogeneous way. This is what is usually referred to as bipolar database querying. Different frameworks have been introduced to deal with such bipolarity. In this chapter, an overview of two approaches is given. The first approach is based on mandatory and desired requirements. Hereby the complement of a mandatory requirement can be considered as a specification of what is not desired at all. So, mandatory requirements indirectly contribute to negative information (expressing what the user does not want to retrieve), whereas desired requirements can be seen as positive information (expressing what the user prefers to retrieve). The second approach is directly based on positive requirements (expressing what the user wants to retrieve), and negative requirements (expressing what the user does not want to retrieve). Both approaches use pairs of satisfaction degrees as the underlying framework but have different semantics, and thus also different operators for criteria evaluation, ranking, aggregation, etc