CAREER: Tracing the Provenance and Flow of Data

这项研究项目的目标是调查技术和开发有效的工具，以便在相互关联的数据库网络中追踪数据的来源和流动，其中每个数据库都可能不断发展。本文研究了以下三个关键领域：(1)通过约束推断关系/XML数据的来源。数据库或数据库版本之间的关系通常可以通过诸如约束之类的高级抽象来描述。因此，跟踪数据块的来源或流涉及到通过约束对数据块的移动进行推理。(2)基于出处的标注管理系统。该系统提供了另一种计算来源的方法。当数据被转换时，它“急切地”将来源作为注解携带。(3)基于键约束的归档工具箱。提供了一组实用程序，用于以语义上有意义的方式有效地归档和管理不断发展的数据库。档案是这样的，一段数据的来源可以很容易地追踪。该项目的结果在许多领域具有潜在的应用前景，特别是在生物信息学等科学数据库中。在适用的情况下，本项目的结果将被原型化，并将在合成和真实数据集上进行实验评估，以评估结果的有效性。研究结果还将被整合到加州大学圣克鲁斯分校开发和教授的关于数据来源的高级数据库主题课程中。项目网站http://www.cs.ucsc.edu/~wctan/provenance/将用于广泛传播本项目产生的所有课程材料、出版物和软件。

The goal of this research project is to investigate techniques and develop effective tools for tracing the provenance and flow of data in a network of inter-related databases where each database may be constantly evolving. The following three key areas are investigated: (1) Reasoning about provenance for relational/XML data through constraints. The relationships between databases or versions of databases can often be described by high-level abstractions such as constraints. Hence, tracing the provenance or flow of a piece of data involves reasoning about the movement of a piece of data through constraints. (2) An annotation management system based on provenance. This system provides an alternative method for computing provenance. It does so "eagerly" by carrying provenance along as annotations when data is transformed. (3) An archiving toolkit based on key constraints. A set of utilities for efficiently archiving and managing evolving databases in a semantically meaningful way is provided. The archive is such that the provenance of a piece of data can be easily traced. The results of this project have potential applications in many domains, in particular in scientific databases such as bioinformatics. Whenever applicable, results of this project will be prototyped and experimental evaluations will be conducted on both synthetic and real datasets in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the results. The results will also be integrated into an advanced database topics course on data provenance that will be developed and taught at UC Santa Cruz. Project website http://www.cs.ucsc.edu/~wctan/provenance/ will be used for wide dissemination of all course materials, publications, and software that result from this project.