Using a web Personal Evaluation Tool – PET for lexicographic multi-criteria service selection

The amount of information stored on the Internet grows every day. Users are forced to deal with an overwhelming number of possibilities, and continuously make decisions if they want to obtain meaningful information or services.The paper describes an approach for a simple yet effective selection of the most suitable information and web services that fit user’s needs. The novelty of the approach is twofold: the concept of lexicographical preferences is distinctively used for a multi-criteria decision-making; a simple mechanism of representing user’s criterion satisfaction levels is proposed. The lexicographic preferences allow for mimicking user’s attitude that some criteria should be satisfied before other criteria are considered. The criterion satisfaction levels are defined with a single threshold that represents a boundary value between acceptable and unacceptable values of attributes of alternatives.The paper includes results of case studies preformed on a prototype of a web selection system built using the proposed approach.