Ordinal properties of data related to preferences have been taken into account in the Dominance-based Rough Set Approach (DRSA). We show that DRSA is also relevant in case where preferences are not considered but a kind of monotonicity relating attribute values is meaningful for the analysis of data at hand. In general terms, monotonicity concerns relationship between different aspects of a phenomenon described by data: for example, “the larger the house, the higher its price” or “the closer the house to the city centre, the higher its price”. In this perspective, the DRSA gives a very general framework in which the classical rough set approach based on indiscernibility relation can be considered as a special case.