Reactive ranking for cooperative databases

A cooperative database allows the user to specify approximate or vague query conditions. A vague query requires the database system to rank the retrieved answers according to their similarity to that query. In this paper we discuss a reactive ranking strategy for cooperative databases. The reactiveness in our approach is provided by an interactive mechanism which allows the user to select the answers of his preference and then uses these answers to tune the original user query. The ranking formula we propose is derived from a parallel with the AutoClass II system-a Bayesian probabilistic classification engine. The reactive mechanism we propose is derived from a parallel with the technique of relevance feedback widely used in the area of information retrieval. We implemented our cooperative and reactive ranking approach in a Web browser interface and did some experimentation. Our experiments provide initial evidence that our approach might help the user to solve query tasks more precisely and in shorter time