A Fuzzy Case Retrieval Approach Based on SQL
for Implementing Electronic Catalogs

Luigi Portinale and Stefania Montani

Dipartimento di Informatica
Universit del Piemonte Orientale Amedeo Avogadro
Spalto Marengo 33 - 15100 Alessandria (ITALY)
{portinal, stefania}@unipmn.it



Abstract. Providing a flexible and efficient way of consulting a catalog
in e-commerce applications is of primary importance in order to guarantee 
the customer with a set of products actually related to his/her interests. 
ost electronic catalogs exploit standard database techniques both
for storage and retrieval of product information. However, a naive application 
of ordinary databases may produce unsatisfactory results, since
standard query tools are not able to retrieve information (i.e. products)
that only partially match the user/customer specification. The use of
CBR may alleviate some of the above problems, because of the ability
of a CBR system of retrieving products having characteristics similar
to the ones specified by the user. While the majority of the approaches
is based on k-NN retrieval techniques, in the present paper we propose
fuzzy-based retrieval as a natural way for implementing flexible search on
electronic catalogs. Since the exploitation of standard DBMS technology
is of paramount importance for deploying any E-commerce application,
we also propose to use a fuzzy extension to SQL for retrieving a set of
products that the customer specifies using precise as well as vague or imprecise 
features. The proposed implementation is based on a client/server
web-based architecture working on top of a relational standard DBMS. A
specific example concerning an on-line wine shop is used to demonstrate
the capabilities of the approach.
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