The CareDB context and preference-aware database system

This paper provides an overview of the CareDB context and preference-aware database system. CareDB provides efficient and scalable personalized query answers to users based on their preferences and current surrounding context. Traditional relational database system employ rigid "all or nothing" semantics when answering queries. CareDB moves beyond such rigidness by providing support for "preference-aware" query processing methods. Specifically, CareDB supports a plethora of multi-objective preference methods capable of finding the "best alternatives" according to users' given preference objectives. This paper first describes the architecture of the CareDB system. It then describes the details for three of CareDB's novel query processing characteristics: (1) a generic and extensible preference-aware query processing engine, (2) a framework to gracefully handle contextual attributes that are expensive to retrieve, and (3) a framework to efficiently process queries over uncertain contextual data. Finally, it describes a prototype of the CareDB system and discusses interesting future research directions in personalized systems.