Contextual Preference Repositories for Personalized Query Answering

The emerging of ubiquitous computing technologies in recent years has given rise to numerous personalized applications where user preferences and contexts are key features in providing suitable individual product recommendation as well as in personalizing query results according to user profile. Following this trend, it is noticeable the increasing interest of database researchers in developing efficient methods for incorporating context-aware preference querying facilities in database systems. In this work we develop a Preference Repository for storing and managing contextual preferences for each user through time. The evolution of the contexts of a specific user is handled by means of a contextual graph which plays an important role in the operations of storing, updating and retrieving preferences from the repository that match best to a given user context.