Provenance Traces

Provenance is information about the origin, derivation, ownership, or history of an object. It has recently been studied extensively in scientific databases and other settings due to its importance in helping scientists judge data validity, quality and integrity. However, most models of provenance have been stated as ad hoc definitions motivated by informal concepts such as "comes from", "influences", "produces", or "depends on". These models lack clear formalizations describing in what sense the definitions capture these intuitive concepts. This makes it difficult to compare approaches, evaluate their effectiveness, or argue about their validity. We introduce provenance traces, a general form of provenance for the nested relational calculus (NRC), a core database query language. Provenance traces are related to the traces that have been used in self-adjusting computation, but differ in important respects. We define a tracing operational semanti...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: CORR
• Authors: James Cheney, Umut A. Acar, Amal Ahmed
• Keywords: CORR 2008, Education, Provenance, Provenance Traces, Scientists Judge Data