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 approximate to, incomparability relation parallel to and conflicting relation perpendicular to, 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. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.