Given an integer k, a representative skyline contains the k skyline points that best describe the tradeoffs among different dimensions offered by the full skyline. Although this topic has been previously studied, the existing solution may sometimes produce k points that appear in an arbitrarily tiny cluster, and therefore, fail to be representative. Motivated by this, we propose a new definition of representative skyline that minimizes the distance between a non-representative skyline point and its nearest representative. We also study algorithms for computing distance-based representative skylines. In 2D space, there is a dynamic programming algorithm that guarantees the optimal solution. For dimensionality at least 3, we prove that the problem is NP-hard, and give a 2-approximate polynomial time algorithm. Using a multidimensional access method, our algorithm can directly report the representative skyline, without retrieving the full skyline. We show that our representative skyline n...