Confusionbetweenhierarchiespartitionedbyapercentagerule.docVIP

Confusion between Hierarchies Partitioned by a Percentage Rule Serguei Levachkine, Adolfo Guzman Centro de Investigación en Computación, Instituto Politécnico Nacional. 07738 Mexico City, MEXICO palych@cic.ipn.mx, a.guzman@ Abstract. Percentage hierarchies describe the structure inherent in a set S of qualitative values such as {Europe Italy France Spain Milan Venice Rome Paris Lyon Madrid Granada Barcelona}. A hierarchy for S is a tree whose root is S, and all sons form a partition of their father. In a percentage hierarchy, the relative sizes of the number of elements of each son with respect to their father is known. For these hierarchies, the confusion resulting when using a value instead of another is defined. This definition agrees with the intuitive use and estimation of error when a wrong but approximate answer to a given question is produced. For database retrieval, predicates may be imperfectly fulfilled (due to confusion). We give definitions and examples of P holds for object o with confusion (, written P( holds for o, for controlled retrieval. Hierarchies are a simpler version of ontologies, albeit very useful. Introduction Context is always present in a datum; a datum is a relational entity. Even when we see “physician”, we have intuition of how far this concept is from “nurse” and how wrong we are if we confuse it with “patient”, or with “dog” or “polynomial.” The paper defines hierarchy and percentage hierarchy. Then, the paper formalizes the notion of confusion between elements of a hierarchy. Furthermore, this notion is extended to percentage hierarchies. Finally, a method is exposed for defining and answering approximate queries on these hierarchies. Paper [8] in this book gives some definitions, which we reproduce here. Ordered set. An element set whose values are ordered by a (less than) relation. ( Example: {icy, cold, tepid, worm, hot, burning}. Partition. K is a partition of set S if it is both a covering for S and an exclusive set. ( The