On Decisive Skyline Queries

Skyline queries aim to identify a set of interesting objects that balance different user-specified criteria, i.e., that have values as good as possible in all specified criteria. However, objects whose values are good in only a subset of the given criteria are also included in the skyline set, even though they may take arbitrarily bad values in the remaining criteria. To alleviate this shortcoming, we study the decisive subspaces that express the semantics of skyline points and determine skyline membership. We propose a novel query, called decisive skyline query, which retrieves a set of points that balance all specified criteria. Our experimental study shows that the newly proposed query is more informative for the user.