Operators of preference composition for CP-nets

Now the handling of user preference is becoming an increasingly important issue in database fields where they capture soft criteria for queries. A broader category of qualitative preferences with dependent relations among multiple attributes is widely existing, which is CP-nets. In this article, we focus on designing the operators of preference composition for CP-nets. Firstly, we extend Pareto composition to our model by including equivalence relation ≈, incomparability relation ∥ and conflicting relation ⊥, which can preserve a strict partial order and conditional associativity. On this basis, two questions are solved: (a) the generation of satisfiability sequences for CP-nets, (b) the top-k queries of relational database with CP-nets preference. For (a), a CP-net is induced into multiple tables, consequently the strong dominance tests between outcomes can be solved by using preference composition instead of using induced preference graph of CP-nets. For (b), we adopt the concept of Query Lattice to provide a natural semantics for the block sequence answering a preference query, where two algorithms (called QOCP and IQOCP) are introduced. These questions are solved efficiently and effectively at the perspective of combination of graph model and relational database.