SIMS
Scalable Incompleteness and Inconsistency Management Strategies
Though there is much work on how inconsistency and incompleteness in databases should be managed, there is good reason to believe that end users will want to bring their domain expertise and needs to bear in how to deal with them. In past work on dealing with inconsistent and incomplete information, the common assumption is that there exists a single epistemically correct way of solving or reasoning about it for all applications. Worse still database researchers often assume they are better qualified to reason about data than the domain experts who understand that data and work with it every day. Such users should have the ability to express policies to manage such data based on their mission, their needs, their knowledge of the data, and their understanding of the risks of adopting certain policies. In many cases, different users of the same database might have different needs and might want to resolve inconsistency and incompleteness by taking their knowledge of the data into account. Tools for managing inconsistent and incomplete data today do not support such users. End users should be able to define policies to manage their data.
The main goal of this project is to provide a single tool to define policies for handling inconsistency and incompleteness according to users' needs.
Currently, the SIMS portal allows users to upload their data to a reliable secure storage server, browse and query their data from the web, manage inconsistent data using a built-in set of policies.
Some challenges we will address include the definition of incompleteness management policy, the definition of a policy articulation language, the developing of algorithms and data structures to efficiently answer queries taking policies into account.
Project Lead: Prof. V.S. Subrahmanian.
For additional information, please contact Dr. Cristian Molinaro or Professor V.S. Subrahmanian.
Last updated: August 2009.
Research and implementation of this project performed jointly by members of the University of Maryland and University of Calabria.
This page will be updated as our work enters print. For information about receiving draft publications, technical reports, and conference presentations, please do not hesitate to contact team members.
The following link will take you to the SIMS online portal.