A system for management and analysis of preference data

Preference data arises in a wide variety of domains. Over the past decade, we have seen a sharp increase in the volume of preference data, in the diversity of applications that use it, and in the richness of preference data analysis methods. Examples of applications include rank aggregation in genomic data analysis, management of votes in elections, and recommendation systems in e-commerce. However, little attention has been paid to the challenges of building a system for preference-data management, which would help incorporate sophisticated analytics into larger applications, support computational abstractions for usability by data scientists, and enable scaling up to modern volumes. This vision paper proposes a management system for preference data that aims to address these challenges. We adopt the relational database model, and propose extensions that are specialized to handling preference data. Specically, we introduce a special type of a relation that is designed for preference data, and describe composable operators on preference relations that can be embedded in SQL statements, for convenient reuse across applications.