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Why and Where: A Characterization of Data Provenance

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Database Theory — ICDT 2001 (ICDT 2001)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1973))

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Abstract

With the proliferation of database views and curated data- bases, 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).

Supported in part by an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, 200 South 33rd Street, PA 19104, Philadelphia, USA

    Peter Buneman, Sanjeev Khanna & Tan Wang-Chiew

Authors
  1. Peter Buneman
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  2. Sanjeev Khanna
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  3. Tan Wang-Chiew
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Limburg University (LUC), 3590, Diepenbeek, Belgium

    Jan Van den Bussche

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, 92093-0114, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Victor Vianu

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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Buneman, P., Khanna, S., Wang-Chiew, T. (2001). Why and Where: A Characterization of Data Provenance. In: Van den Bussche, J., Vianu, V. (eds) Database Theory — ICDT 2001. ICDT 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1973. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44503-X_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44503-X_20

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-41456-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44503-6

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