25 research outputs found
On the Limitations of Provenance for Queries With Difference
The annotation of the results of database transformations was shown to be
very effective for various applications. Until recently, most works in this
context focused on positive query languages. The provenance semirings is a
particular approach that was proven effective for these languages, and it was
shown that when propagating provenance with semirings, the expected equivalence
axioms of the corresponding query languages are satisfied. There have been
several attempts to extend the framework to account for relational algebra
queries with difference. We show here that these suggestions fail to satisfy
some expected equivalence axioms (that in particular hold for queries on
"standard" set and bag databases). Interestingly, we show that this is not a
pitfall of these particular attempts, but rather every such attempt is bound to
fail in satisfying these axioms, for some semirings. Finally, we show
particular semirings for which an extension for supporting difference is
(im)possible.Comment: TAPP 201
First-Order Provenance Games
We propose a new model of provenance, based on a game-theoretic approach to
query evaluation. First, we study games G in their own right, and ask how to
explain that a position x in G is won, lost, or drawn. The resulting notion of
game provenance is closely related to winning strategies, and excludes from
provenance all "bad moves", i.e., those which unnecessarily allow the opponent
to improve the outcome of a play. In this way, the value of a position is
determined by its game provenance. We then define provenance games by viewing
the evaluation of a first-order query as a game between two players who argue
whether a tuple is in the query answer. For RA+ queries, we show that game
provenance is equivalent to the most general semiring of provenance polynomials
N[X]. Variants of our game yield other known semirings. However, unlike
semiring provenance, game provenance also provides a "built-in" way to handle
negation and thus to answer why-not questions: In (provenance) games, the
reason why x is not won, is the same as why x is lost or drawn (the latter is
possible for games with draws). Since first-order provenance games are
draw-free, they yield a new provenance model that combines how- and why-not
provenance
Provenance for SPARQL queries
Determining trust of data available in the Semantic Web is fundamental for
applications and users, in particular for linked open data obtained from SPARQL
endpoints. There exist several proposals in the literature to annotate SPARQL
query results with values from abstract models, adapting the seminal works on
provenance for annotated relational databases. We provide an approach capable
of providing provenance information for a large and significant fragment of
SPARQL 1.1, including for the first time the major non-monotonic constructs
under multiset semantics. The approach is based on the translation of SPARQL
into relational queries over annotated relations with values of the most
general m-semiring, and in this way also refuting a claim in the literature
that the OPTIONAL construct of SPARQL cannot be captured appropriately with the
known abstract models.Comment: 22 pages, extended version of the ISWC 2012 paper including proof
Provenance for Aggregate Queries
We study in this paper provenance information for queries with aggregation.
Provenance information was studied in the context of various query languages
that do not allow for aggregation, and recent work has suggested to capture
provenance by annotating the different database tuples with elements of a
commutative semiring and propagating the annotations through query evaluation.
We show that aggregate queries pose novel challenges rendering this approach
inapplicable. Consequently, we propose a new approach, where we annotate with
provenance information not just tuples but also the individual values within
tuples, using provenance to describe the values computation. We realize this
approach in a concrete construction, first for "simple" queries where the
aggregation operator is the last one applied, and then for arbitrary (positive)
relational algebra queries with aggregation; the latter queries are shown to be
more challenging in this context. Finally, we use aggregation to encode queries
with difference, and study the semantics obtained for such queries on
provenance annotated databases
Snapshot Semantics for Temporal Multiset Relations (Extended Version)
Snapshot semantics is widely used for evaluating queries over temporal data:
temporal relations are seen as sequences of snapshot relations, and queries are
evaluated at each snapshot. In this work, we demonstrate that current
approaches for snapshot semantics over interval-timestamped multiset relations
are subject to two bugs regarding snapshot aggregation and bag difference. We
introduce a novel temporal data model based on K-relations that overcomes these
bugs and prove it to correctly encode snapshot semantics. Furthermore, we
present an efficient implementation of our model as a database middleware and
demonstrate experimentally that our approach is competitive with native
implementations and significantly outperforms such implementations on queries
that involve aggregation.Comment: extended version of PVLDB pape
Elementary Equivalence Versus Isomorphism in Semiring Semantics
We study the first-order axiomatisability of finite semiring interpretations or, equivalently, the question whether elementary equivalence and isomorphism coincide for valuations of atomic facts over a finite universe into a commutative semiring. Contrary to the classical case of Boolean semantics, where every finite structure is axiomatised up to isomorphism by a first-order sentence, the situation in semiring semantics is rather different, and depends on the underlying semiring. We prove that for a number of important semirings, including min-max semirings, and the semirings of positive Boolean expressions, there exist finite semiring interpretations that are elementarily equivalent but not isomorphic. The same is true for the polynomial semirings that are universal for the classes of absorptive, idempotent, and fully idempotent semirings, respectively. On the other side, we prove that for other, practically relevant, semirings such as the Viterby semiring ?, the tropical semiring ?, the natural semiring ? and the universal polynomial semiring ?[X], all finite semiring interpretations are first-order axiomatisable, and thus elementary equivalence implies isomorphism