Clean Answers over Dirty Databases: A Probabilistic Approach

The detection of duplicate tuples, corresponding to the same real-world entity, is an important task in data integration and cleaning. While many techniques exist to identify such tuples, the merging or elimination of duplicates can be a difficult task that relies on ad-hoc and often manual solutions. We propose a complementary approach that permits declarative query answering over duplicated data, where each duplicate is associated with a probability of being in the clean database. We rewrite queries over a database containing duplicates to return each answer with the probability that the answer is in the clean database. Our rewritten queries are sensitive to the semantics of duplication and help a user understand which query answers are most likely to be present in the clean database. The semantics that we adopt is independent of the way the probabilities are produced, but is able to effectively exploit them during query answering. In the absence of external knowledge that associate...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ICDE
• Authors: Ariel Fuxman, Periklis Andritsos, Renée J. Miller
• Keywords: Clean Database, Database, ICDE 2006, Query Answering, Rewritten Queries