Skyline Operators and Regret Minimization Techniques for Managing User Preferences in the Query Process

Abstract

The problem of selecting the most representative tuples from a dataset has led to the development of powerful tools, among which Skyline and Ranking (or Top-k) queries stand out for their ability to support the optimization of multiple criteria in the query process. This paper surveys the remarkable efforts made towards the extension of the aforementioned tools to overcome their limitations, respectively the explosion of the output result and the difficulty of query formulation. Moreover, we explore the application of these state-of-the-art techniques as preference-based query frameworks, proposing a comparison of their query personalization capabilities, the ability to control the output size and their flexibility with respect to the user input preferences.