As information becomes available in increasing amounts, and to growing numbers of users, the shift towards a more user-centered, or personalized access to information becomes crucial. In this paper we consider the semantics and pragmatics of preference queries over tables containing information objects described through a set of attributes. In particular, we address two basic issues: 1. How to define a preference query and its answer (semantics)2. How to evaluate a preference query (pragmatics) The main contributions of this paper are (a) the proposal of an expressive language for declaring qualitative preferences, (b) a novel approach to evaluating a preference query (c) the design of a user friendly interface with preference queries. Although our main motivation originates in digital libraries, our proposal is quite general and can be used in several application contexts.
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