Satisfaction-Based Selection of XML Documents

XML documents are becoming the most common approach to represent entities of the real world. Users need to select such entities based on their expectations in terms of both requirements and preferences. The selection process should deal with a potentially high number of documents representing similar entities and with the diversity of the perceived satisfactions of the users. In this paper, we present XMatch, a query language enabling the expression of users requests about the expected satisfaction over XML documents. This language improves the expressiveness of queries and supports aggregation of an high number of elementary satisfactions.