Patent ID: 7707207

Claim:
A system that generates a skyline that prioritizes data comprising: one or more processors; and one or more memories communicatively coupled to the one or more processors, the one or more memories having stored instructions that, when executed, configure the system to implement: an interface component that receives a query and at least one associated preference; and an optimization component communicatively coupled to the interface component that generates the skyline based at least in part on the received query and the at least one associated preference, wherein: the optimization component further comprises comprising a cardinality estimation component that ascertains an estimated cardinality of the skyline; and the cardinality estimation component determines the estimated cardinality of the skyline based at least in part on ⁢ n ⁢ ∑ ⁢ ∫ [ 0 , 1 ] d ⁢ P 1 ⁡ ( v ) ⁢ ( 1 - P 2 ⁡ ( v ) ⁢ x 1 ⁢ … ⁢ ⁢ x d ) n ⁢ ⁢ ⅆ x 1 ⁢ … ⁢ ⁢ ⅆ x d ⁢ where n represents a number of tuples, d represents a number of numeric preferences, P 1 (v) represents a probability that attributes {Y 1 . . . Y k } have a value given as a vector v, and P 2 (v) represents a probability that attributes {Y 1 . . . Y k } have a value less than or equal to the vector v, where Y i represents a predicate preference.