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Why Not?

Summary: Proposes a WHY NOT? model to explain missing results, with two algorithms to locate the discarded data item and two tracing approaches. User study confirms usefulness for expert users and suggests reduced debugging through targeted explanations. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID
4144
Venue
SIGMOD
Year
2009
Pagerank
0.00022050218
Overall Rank
487 | 96.62%
DOI
-

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 50 of 52 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
1,119 The Complexity of Causality and Responsibility for Query Answers and non-Answers 2011 VLDB 0.0001386199
1,125 How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions 2010 SIGMOD 0.00013845652
2,428 VOGUE: Towards A Visual Interaction-aware Graph Query Processing Framework 2013 CIDR 8.8367608e-05
2,562 Explaining Missing Answers to SPJUA Queries 2010 VLDB 8.5386194e-05
2,602 Tracing Data Errors with View-Conditioned Causality 2011 SIGMOD 8.4667197e-05
2,753 Complaint-driven Training Data Debugging for Query 2.0 2020 SIGMOD 8.1724339e-05
2,797 Query-Oriented Data Cleaning with Oracles 2015 SIGMOD 8.1108589e-05
2,892 Data Provenance at Internet Scale: Architecture, Experiences, and the Road Ahead 2017 CIDR 7.9480559e-05
3,051 Partial Results in Database Systems 2014 SIGMOD 7.6512591e-05
3,095 Answering Why-not Questions on Reverse Top-k Queries 2015 VLDB 7.5692859e-05
3,197 A Probabilistic Optimization Framework for the Empty-Answer Problem 2013 VLDB 7.3955829e-05
3,242 Explanation-Based Auditing 2012 VLDB 7.3301779e-05
3,913 Rudolf: Interactive Rule Refinement System for Fraud Detection 2016 VLDB 6.6346244e-05
4,361 The Complexity of Resilience and Responsibility for Self-Join-Free Conjunctive Queries 2016 VLDB 6.2559141e-05
4,774 LIMA: Fine-grained Lineage Tracing and Reuse in Machine Learning Systems 2021 SIGMOD 5.9316087e-05
4,937 New Results for the Complexity of Resilience for Binary Conjunctive Queries with Self-Joins 2020 PODS 5.8187108e-05
5,191 Going Beyond Provenance: Explaining Query Answers with Pattern-based Counterbalances 2019 SIGMOD 5.6378768e-05
5,418 High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies 2015 PODS 5.5178123e-05
5,445 QFix: Diagnosing Errors through Query Histories 2017 SIGMOD 5.5020909e-05
5,691 Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs 2021 SIGMOD 5.3684557e-05
5,733 Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples 2019 SIGMOD 5.3483446e-05
5,826 Why Not Yet: Fixing a Top-k Ranking that Is Not Fair to Individuals 2023 VLDB 5.3124507e-05
5,916 Banzhaf Values for Facts in Query Answering 2024 SIGMOD 5.273953e-05
6,429 ShapGraph: An Holistic View of Explanations through Provenance Graphs and Shapley Values 2022 SIGMOD 5.0666822e-05
6,475 Explain3D: Explaining Disagreements in Disjoint Datasets 2019 VLDB 5.0497183e-05
6,534 Automatic Rule Refinement for Information Extraction 2010 VLDB 5.0244622e-05
6,573 EFQ: Why-Not Answer Polynomials in Action 2015 VLDB 5.0058435e-05
6,696 Approximate Summaries for Why and Why-not Provenance 2020 VLDB 4.9581958e-05
6,943 TRAMP: Understanding the Behavior of Schema Mappings through Provenance 2010 VLDB 4.8916728e-05
6,975 NLProveNAns: Natural Language Provenance for Non-Answers 2018 VLDB 4.8772572e-05
7,172 Summarized Causal Explanations For Aggregate Views 2024 SIGMOD 4.8114797e-05
7,561 Efficient Recovery of Missing Events 2013 VLDB 4.7102455e-05
7,678 To Not Miss the Forest for the Trees - A Holistic Approach for Explaining Missing Answers over Nested Data 2021 SIGMOD 4.6813062e-05
7,857 Fixed It For You: Protocol Repair Using Lineage Graphs 2019 CIDR 4.6345517e-05
8,140 Erebus: Explaining the Outputs of Data Streaming Queries 2023 VLDB 4.5768015e-05
8,149 Why Not Match: On Explanations of Event Pattern Queries 2021 SIGMOD 4.5752863e-05
8,230 You Say 'What', I Hear 'Where' and 'Why' - (Mis-)Interpreting SQL to Derive Fine-Grained Provenance 2018 VLDB 4.5541444e-05
8,345 SlabCity: Whole-Query Optimization using Program Synthesis 2023 VLDB 4.5426916e-05
8,388 FEDEX: An Explainability Framework for Data Exploration Steps 2022 VLDB 4.5297787e-05
8,954 Understanding Queries by Conditional Instances 2022 SIGMOD 4.4221863e-05
9,196 QOCO: A Query Oriented Data Cleaning System with Oracles 2015 VLDB 4.3749064e-05
9,644 Fair and Actionable Causal Prescription Ruleset 2025 SIGMOD 4.3109001e-05
9,704 Debugging Missing Answers for Spark Queries over Nested Data with Breadcrumb 2021 VLDB 4.3005882e-05
9,766 DPXPlain: Privately Explaining Aggregate Query Answers 2023 VLDB 4.2856106e-05
9,921 ProvCite: Provenance-based Data Citation 2019 VLDB 4.2549509e-05
10,269 Database Views as Explanations for Relational Deep Learning 2026 VLDB 4.1945683e-05
10,277 Efficient Query Repair for Aggregate Constraints 2026 VLDB 4.1945683e-05
10,393 SHARQ: Explainability Framework for Association Rules on Relational Data 2025 SIGMOD 4.1945683e-05
10,740 Finding Convincing Views to Endorse a Claim 2025 VLDB 4.1945683e-05
11,471 On Optimizing the Trade-off between Privacy and Utility in Data Provenance 2021 SIGMOD 4.1945683e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 10 of 10 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank Cited Paper Year Venue Pagerank
101 ULDBs: Databases with Uncertainty and Lineage 2006 VLDB 0.0004955674
149 Trio: A System for Integrated Management of Data, Accuracy, and Lineage 2005 CIDR 0.00041101118
561 An Annotation Management System for Relational Databases 2004 VLDB 0.00020115419
611 Lineage Tracing for General Data Warehouse Transformations 2001 VLDB 0.00019231115
646 Verifying Completeness of Relational Query Results in Data Publishing 2005 SIGMOD 0.0001871827
652 On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data 2008 VLDB 0.00018634477
676 Archiving Scientific Data 2002 SIGMOD 0.00018281665
1,413 VisTrails: Visualization meets Data Management 2006 SIGMOD 0.00012121257
4,163 Trio-One: Layering Uncertainty and Lineage on a Conventional DBMS 2007 CIDR 6.3923196e-05
5,843 Tracing Lineage Beyond Relational Operators 2007 VLDB 5.3032967e-05
Previous Page 1 / 1 Next

Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank Paper Year Venue Pagerank
2,649 Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases 2016 VLDB 8.3719123e-05
8,230 You Say 'What', I Hear 'Where' and 'Why' - (Mis-)Interpreting SQL to Derive Fine-Grained Provenance 2018 VLDB 4.5541444e-05
3,095 Answering Why-not Questions on Reverse Top-k Queries 2015 VLDB 7.5692859e-05
5,418 High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies 2015 PODS 5.5178123e-05
6,573 EFQ: Why-Not Answer Polynomials in Action 2015 VLDB 5.0058435e-05
6,975 NLProveNAns: Natural Language Provenance for Non-Answers 2018 VLDB 4.8772572e-05
5,733 Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples 2019 SIGMOD 5.3483446e-05
942 A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries 2014 SIGMOD 0.00015155714
652 On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data 2008 VLDB 0.00018634477
1,125 How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions 2010 SIGMOD 0.00013845652