Querying with Intrinsic Preferences

The handling of user preferences is becoming an increasingly important issue in present-day information systems. Among others, preferences are used for information filtering and extraction to reduce the volume of data presented to the user. They are also used to keep track of user profiles and formulate policies to improve and automate decision making. We propose a logical framework for formulating preferences and its embedding into relational query languages. The framework is simple, and entirely neutral with respect to the properties of preferences. It makes it possible to formulate different kinds of preferences and to use preferences in querying databases. We demonstrate the usefulness of the framework through numerous examples.