Understanding the compromise between skyline and ranking queries

TL;DR

This paper surveys the concepts of skyline and ranking queries, highlighting their limitations and exploring the compromise solution of flexible skylines for multi-criteria decision support.

Contribution

It provides an overview of skyline and ranking queries, explaining their foundations and introducing the concept of flexible skylines as a compromise approach.

Findings

Skyline and ranking queries are essential for multi-criteria decision making.

Flexible skylines offer a compromise between the two techniques.

The survey clarifies the concepts and limitations of existing methods.

Abstract

Skyline and Ranking queries have gained great popularity in the recent years. These two techniques are crucial for multi-criteria decision support applications, which are now more popular than ever before. Skyline and Ranking queries are, however, affected by well-known limitations. In the past recent years, the database community provided numerous studies in this field with the aim to overcome the weaknesses of these two approaches. This survey introduces the reader to Skyline and Ranking queries, explaining the concepts on which they are based, with the intent to present the compromise between the two techniques: flexible skylines.