The goal of this project is to invent and develop new technologies for interactive querying of online databases which support electronic commerce and electronic transactions. The specific problem addressed in this project is that if the answer set to a query consists of a very large number of items, users may not be able to examine all the answers but rather limit themselves to subsets of answers. Consequently, if a user's decision is based only on some subset of answers retrieved from the database, certain vendors may end up getting preferential treatment. Thus, online databases used in browsing and purchasing will be forced to develop "fair" information presentation issues. This project aims to develop information presentation strategies for such networked environments. A novel approach is being explored to create "fair" presentation models based on explicit contracts between vendors and the database system. Such contracts specify how often a given object is to be displayed in response to relevant user queries. In particular, query processing algorithms with respect to the display size of the client are being developed. Moreover, a prototype is built to experiment with the theoretical performance of the algorithms with respect to scalability. This research will have a potentially large impact on the technologies used in information sources for electronic commerce, including web search engines, online catalogs, and electronic advertising.
