From Provenance Polynomials to Provenance Patterns: More Mileage for Mere Mortals

Talk by Bertram Ludäscher

Location: APB room 3027
Start: 9. March 2023 at 11:00 am
End: 9. March 2023 at 12:00 pm
Event series: Research Seminar Logic and AI
iCal

Abstract:

It is well known that the commutative semiring of integer polynomials N[X] provides an elegant unifying framework (a.k.a. how-provenance) for a number of earlier provenance approaches in databases. A provenance-annotated answer A’ to a query Q reveals how outputs depend on inputs from the annotated database D′ and thus it can be used to answer strictly more questions than the original answer A = Q(D) without provenance. We propose to use provenance patterns, a related notion implicit in earlier work, to support answering additional questions, not answerable by A′ alone. We show that the pattern-enhanced answer A* can be easily obtained as a by-product of computing A or A’. Using a detailed running example, we illustrate questions that can and cannot be answered using A, A′, and A*, respectively. Time allowing, I’d also like to touch upon related research in answering why-not provenance questions.

About the speaker: Bertram Ludäscher is a professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he is also a faculty affiliate with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the CS department. Prior to joining UIUC, he was a professor at the CS department and the UC Davis Genome Center at the University of California, Davis. His research interests range from practical questions in scientific data management and workflow automation, to database theory, and knowledge representation & reasoning. Before his faculty appointments, he was a research scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and an adjunct faculty at the CSE department at UCSD. He holds a M.S. (Dipl.-Inform.) in CS from the University of Karlsruhe (K.I.T.) and a PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) from the University of Freiburg.

The talk will take place in a hybrid fashion, physically in the APB room 3027, and online through the link:

https://bbb.tu-dresden.de/b/pio-zwt-smp-aus