TIGER: Querying large tables through criteria extension

Sales on the Internet have increased significantly during the last decade, and so, it is crucial for companies to retain customers on their web site. Among all strategies towards this goal, providing customers with a flexible search tool is a crucial issue. In this paper, we propose an approach, called TIGER, for handling such flexibility automatically. More precisely, if the search criteria of a given query to a relational table or a Web catalog are too restrictive, our approach computes a new query combining extensions of the criteria. This new query maximizes the quality of the answer, while being as close as possible to the original query. Experiments show that our approach improves the quality of queries, in the sense explained just above.