Abstract
Sometimes one does not want all the solutions to a query but instead only those that are most desirable according to user-specified preferences. If a user-specified preference relation is acyclic then its specification and meaning are straightforward. In many settings, however, it is valuable to support preference relations that are not acyclic and that might not even be transitive, in which case though their handling involves some open questions. We discuss a definition of desired solutions for arbitrary preference relations and show its desirable properties. We modify a previous extension to SPARQL for simple preferences to correctly handle any preference relation and provide translations of this extension back into SPARQL that can compute the desired solutions for all preference relations that are acyclic or transitive. We also propose an additional extension that returns solutions at multiple levels of desirability, which adds additional expressiveness over prior work. However, for the latter we conjecture that an effective translation to a single (non-recursive) SPARQL query is not possible.
A poster of part of this paper is being presented at ISWC 2018. An extended technical report version of this paper, including proofs and the main algorithm, is available at http://polleres.net/publications/patel-schneider-etal-2018TR.pdf
Axel Polleres’ work was supported under the Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professors program hosted by The Europe Center of Stanford University.
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Notes
- 1.
In databases, skyline involves a multiway combination of totally ordered comparisons between the values in tuples; qualitative preferences here instead allow an arbitrary comparison relation.
- 2.
SPARQL 1.1 provides a basic mechanism for such external services (e.g., to look up or compute current prices or exchange rates), using the SERVICE keyword [11].
- 3.
To review the basic properties of binary preference relations see Chomicki [10].
- 4.
Chomicky calls this connectivity [10, Definition 2.1].
- 5.
In a later version of [13], available on semanticscholar.org, the approach is extended to handle CP-theories.
- 6.
- 7.
A domination cycle is minimal if the only domination relationships between elements of the cycle are those from one element of the cycle to the next.
- 8.
The full algorithm is in the extended technical report version of the paper.
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Patel-Schneider, P.F., Polleres, A., Martin, D. (2018). Comparative Preferences in SPARQL. In: Faron Zucker, C., Ghidini, C., Napoli, A., Toussaint, Y. (eds) Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management. EKAW 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11313. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03667-6_19
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