Giving the Right Answer: a Brief Overview on How to Extend Ranking and Skyline Queries

Abstract: To retrieve the best results in a database we use Top-K queries and Skyline queries but some problems arise. The formers rely too much on user preferences, which are difficult to quantify and may skew the fetching of the data, while the latters tend to output too much data. In this paper, we explore three different branches of research that seek to overcome such limitations: Flexible/Restricted Skylines, Skyline Ordering/Ranking, and Regret Minimization. We analyze how they work and we make comparisons among them to guide the reader to choose the approach that best fits their use cases.