Uncertainty Annotated Databases - A Lightweight Approach for Approximating Certain Answers

Su Feng, Aaron Huber, Boris Glavic, Oliver Kennedy

Abstract: Certain answers are a principled method for coping with uncertainty that arises in many practical data management tasks. Unfortunately, this method is expensive and may ex- clude useful (if uncertain) answers. Thus, users frequently resort to less principled approaches to resolve uncertainty. In this paper, we propose Uncertainty Annotated Databases (UA-DBs), which combine an under- and over-approximation of certain answers to achieve the reliability of certain answers, with the performance of a classical database system. Furthermore, in contrast to prior work on certain answers, UA-DBs achieve a higher utility by including some (explicitly marked) answers that are not certain. UA-DBs are based on incomplete K-relations, which we introduce to generalize the classical set-based notion of incomplete databases and certain answers to a much larger class of data models. Using an implementation of our approach, we demonstrate experimentally that it efficiently produces tight approximations of certain answers that are of high utility.