Link-based Ranking of Skyline Result Sets

Skyline query processing has received considerable attention in the recent past. Mainly, the skyline query is used to find a set of non dominated data points in a multi-dimensional dataset. One of the major drawbacks of the skyline operator is the high cardinality of the result set. Providing the most interesting points of the skyline set (top-k) inherently involves the ranking of the skyline points. In this paper, we propose a method for ranking the skyline points and therefore for answering top-k skyline queries. First, we introduce the notion of the skyline graph which relies on the dominance relationship of the skyline points in all possible subspaces of the original data space. Using the aforementioned mapping, we can apply well-known link-based ranking algorithms on the skyline graph. Unlike most previously proposed ranking approaches we do not rely on user defined functions and do not impose arbitrary preferences on some dimensions. An experimental evaluation of the proposed method is presented illustrating the ranking ability of our framework.