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Algebraic Constructs for Querying Provenance

Authors:
Murali Mani
Mohamad Alawa
Arunlal Kalyanasundaram

Keywords: Provenance; graph; data model; query language; algebraic operators

Abstract:
Provenance that records the derivation history of data is useful for a wide variety of applications, including those where an audit trail needs to be provided, where the trust-level attributed to the sources contribute to determining the trust-level in results etc. There have been different efforts for representing provenance information, the most notable being the Open Provenance Model (OPM). OPM defines structures for representing the provenance information as a graph with nodes and edges, and also specifies inference queries that can be expressed in Datalog/SQL. However, the requirements of a query language for provenance information go much beyond those that can be expressed using only inference queries. In our work, we build on OPM and propose two classes of algebraic constructs for querying provenance information: content-based operators that operate on the content of nodes and edges, and structure-based operators that operate on the graph structure of the provenance graph. An user can express a query as a workflow by composing these content-based and structure-based operators. Our operators are powerful, and an user can express a wide variety of interesting queries on the provenance data, that go much beyond simple inference queries as expressible using Datalog/SQL. As part of our evaluation, we show different queries and how they can be expressed using our constructs.

Pages: 187 to 194

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2012

Publication date: February 29, 2012

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4332

ISBN: 978-1-61208-185-4

Location: Saint Gilles, Reunion

Dates: from February 29, 2012 to March 5, 2012