Nearest neighbour based on subjective human comparison - is this a thing?

Question

I am looking for some clues as to the type of algorithm/data structure or general field of CS to look into...

I have a collection of items that I would like to have a human subjectively compare such that I can derive some consistent dataset that can be queried for k nearest neighbours for a given item that is present in the data.

i.e. if I ask a human, given item A, which item is most similar, B or C (repeated over a set of such items)

I can later present back, when queried, here are the items most similar to A.

The desire is simply to record a person's subjective comparisons of a set of items and have a means to allow them to query it.

Any pointers as to algorithms or structures to read up on would be greatly appreciated.