An Annotation Management System for Relational Databases

We present an annotation management system for relational databases. In this system, every piece of data in a relation is assumed to have zero or more annotations associated with it and annotations are propagated along, from the source to the output, as data is being transformed through a query. Such an annotation management system is important for understanding the provenance and quality of data, especially in applications that deal with integration of scientific and biological data. We present an extension, pSQL, of a fragment of SQL that has three different types of annotation propagation schemes, each useful for different purposes. The default scheme propagates annotations according to where data is copied from. The default-all scheme propagates annotations according to where data is copied from among all equivalent formulations of a given query. The custom scheme allows a user to specify how annotations should propagate. We present a storage scheme for the annotations and descri...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: VLDB
• Authors: Deepavali Bhagwat, Laura Chiticariu, Wang Chiew Tan, Gaurav Vijayvargiya
• Keywords: Annotation, Database, Propagation Scheme, Scheme Propagates Annotations, VLDB 2004