Subjective interpretation of complex data: requirements for supporting the mining process

Information retrieval by subjective content has been recently addressed by the Kansei engineering community in Japan. Such information retrieval systems aim to include subjective aspects of the users, such as their sensibility, in the querying criteria. While many techniques have been proposed to model such users´ aspects, little attention has been placed on analyzing the multi-interpretation of the information involved in the process. We propose a data warehouse as a support for the mining process of such information. A unique characteristic of our data warehouse lays in its ability to store multiple hierarchical descriptions of the multimedia data. Such characteristic is necessary to allow the mining of complex data, not only at different levels of abstraction, but also according to multiple interpretation of the content. The framework we propose can be generalized to support the analysis of any type of complex data that relate to subjective cognitive processes and hence whose interpretation is greatly variable.