| ULDBs: Databases with Uncertainty and Lineage | Positive rating | |
| Omar Benjelloun, Anish Das Sarma, Alon Halevy, Jennifer Widom | ||
There has been considerable activity around uncertainty in databases recently, and also on the maintenance of lineage (or provenance) for data. The set of applications in which we are likely to care about the former has a vary large overlap with the set of applications in which we care about the latter. So thinking about the two concepts jointly makes a great deal of sense, and this paper develops some elegant results in this direction. I would contend, though, that the types of applications that beg for uncertainty and provenance management are also likely to involve data that is not very well structured. As such, I would expect work in this direction to have much greater practical value if done in the context of XML, rather than in the context of the relational data model as in this paper, and in much of the body of literature on similar topics. The simplicity of the relational data model does make it easier to establish theoretical results, and one does have to start somewhere. Kudos to this paper for taking an important first step. | ||