Best-match querying in general database systems-a language approach
Chung-Shu Yang, Gerard Salton · 2005
We reason in this paper that many queries in general database systems are best-match in nature: to a user, some records are more useful than others, and when the best records cannot be found or when there are not a sufficient number of them, the next best records should be retrieved. The heterogeneity of general databases will require different treatment on such queries than that in some special-purpose systems where the concept of best-match has been exploited. Language features are proposed to augment typical query languages in order to accommodate best-match querying. This is intended as another effort toward the design of convenient, expressive user interface to facilitate decision making via database systems.