An Approach to Database Preference Queries Based on an Outranking Relation

In this paper, we describe an approach to database preference queries based on the notion of outranking, suited to the situation where preferences on different attributes are not commensurable. This model constitutes an alternative to the use of Pareto order whose main drawback is to leave many tuples incomparable in general. Even though outranking does not define an order in the mathematical sense of the term, we describe a technique which yields a complete pre-order, based on a global aggregation of the outranking degrees computed for each pair of tuples, which reflects the global aldquo;qualityardquo; of a tuple w.r.t. the others