Soft querying of sensorial data

Data of a sensory profile represent human's evaluations and feelings about intensities of several criterias to describe and compare different products (as the criteria odor of red fruits for a red wine). This article concerns the representation and querying of such data. It is shown that sensorial data are intrinsically imprecise due to this human evaluation (possibilistic data), and especially for untrained people. The data treatment can take advantages of a querying with user's preferences (flexible querying with fuzzy predicates). The classical approach to evaluate a fuzzy predicate on a possibility distribution is based on a possibility and a necessity measures of a fuzzy event and it is shown that this approach may be not convenient. A new expression for the evaluation of a fuzzy predicate on a possibility distribution is then introduced. More complex flexible queries on possibilistic data are defined and methods to rank the answers are also proposed.