Accurate and efficient profile matching in knowledge bases

摘要

A profile describes a set of properties, e.g. a set of skills a person may have, a set of skills required for a particular job, or a set of abilities a football player may have with respect to a particular team strategy. Profile matching aims to determine how well a given profile fits to a requested profile and vice versa. The approach taken in this article is grounded in a matching theory that uses filters in lattices to represent profiles, and matching values in the interval [0,1]: the higher the matching value the better is the fit. Such lattices can be derived from knowledge bases to represent the knowledge about profiles. An interesting question is, how human expertise concerning the matching can be exploited to obtain most accurate matchings. It will be shown that if a set of filters together with matching values by some human expert is given, then under some mild plausibility assumptions a matching measure can be determined such that the computed matching values preserve the relevant rankings given by the expert. A second question concerns the efficient querying of databases of profile instances. For matching queries that result in a ranked list of profile instances matching a given one it will be shown how corresponding top-k queries can be evaluated on grounds of pre-computed matching values. In addition, it will be shown how the matching queries can be exploited for gap queries that determine how profile instances need to be extended in order to improve in the rankings.