Databases With Uncertainty and Lineage

This paper introduces ULDBs, an extension of relational databases with simple yet expressive constructs for representing and manipulating both lineage and uncertainty. Uncertain data and data lineage are two important areas of data management that have been considered extensively in isolation. However, many applications require the features in tandem. Fundamentally, lineage enables simple and consistent representation of uncertain data, it correlates uncertainty in query results with uncertainty in the input data, and query processing with lineage and uncertainty together presents computational benefits over treating them separately. The authors show that the ULDB representation is complete, and that it permits straightforward implementation of many relational operations.