Departmental Papers (CIS)
Date of this Version
January 2001
Document Type
Conference Paper
Recommended Citation
Peter Buneman, Sanjeev Khanna, and Wang-Chiew Tan, "Why and Where: A Characterization of Data Provenance", . January 2001.
Abstract
With the proliferation of database views and curated databases, the issue of data provenance - where a piece of data came from and the process by which it arrived in the database - is becoming increasingly important, especially in scientific databases where understanding provenance is crucial to the accuracy and currency of data. In this paper we describe an approach to computing provenance when the data of interest has been created by a database query. We adopt a syntactic approach and present results for a general data model that applies to relational databases as well as to hierarchical data such as XML. A novel aspect of our work is a distinction between "why" provenance (refers to the source data that had some influence on the existence of the data) and "where" provenance (refers to the location(s) in the source databases from which the data was extracted).
Date Posted: 23 December 2005
Comments
Postprint version. Published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 1973, International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT 2001), pages 316-330.
Publisher URL: http://www.springerlink.com/link.asp?id=edf0k68ccw3a22hu