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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
4145
Venue
SIGMOD
Year
2009
Pagerank
0.00022030123
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 0.00013851012
1,124 How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions 2010 SIGMOD 0.00013832959
2,418 VOGUE: Towards A Visual Interaction-aware Graph Query Processing Framework 2013 CIDR 8.8499974e-05
2,565 Explaining Missing Answers to SPJUA Queries 2010 VLDB 8.5307653e-05
2,600 Tracing Data Errors with View-Conditioned Causality 2011 SIGMOD 8.4652308e-05
2,759 Complaint-driven Training Data Debugging for Query 2.0 2020 SIGMOD 8.1646193e-05
2,805 Query-Oriented Data Cleaning with Oracles 2015 SIGMOD 8.103731e-05
2,903 Data Provenance at Internet Scale: Architecture, Experiences, and the Road Ahead 2017 CIDR 7.9403877e-05
3,054 Partial Results in Database Systems 2014 SIGMOD 7.6478475e-05
3,100 Answering Why-not Questions on Reverse Top-k Queries 2015 VLDB 7.5625111e-05
3,204 A Probabilistic Optimization Framework for the Empty-Answer Problem 2013 VLDB 7.3884503e-05
3,248 Explanation-Based Auditing 2012 VLDB 7.3232501e-05
3,916 Rudolf: Interactive Rule Refinement System for Fraud Detection 2016 VLDB 6.6282452e-05
4,358 The Complexity of Resilience and Responsibility for Self-Join-Free Conjunctive Queries 2016 VLDB 6.2499e-05
4,779 LIMA: Fine-grained Lineage Tracing and Reuse in Machine Learning Systems 2021 SIGMOD 5.9259373e-05
4,940 New Results for the Complexity of Resilience for Binary Conjunctive Queries with Self-Joins 2020 PODS 5.8131196e-05
5,192 Going Beyond Provenance: Explaining Query Answers with Pattern-based Counterbalances 2019 SIGMOD 5.6324589e-05
5,428 High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies 2015 PODS 5.5125084e-05
5,454 QFix: Diagnosing Errors through Query Histories 2017 SIGMOD 5.4967096e-05
5,706 Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs 2021 SIGMOD 5.3633001e-05
5,743 Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples 2019 SIGMOD 5.3432106e-05
5,839 Why Not Yet: Fixing a Top-k Ranking that Is Not Fair to Individuals 2023 VLDB 5.3073497e-05
5,918 Banzhaf Values for Facts in Query Answering 2024 SIGMOD 5.2688869e-05
6,424 ShapGraph: An Holistic View of Explanations through Provenance Graphs and Shapley Values 2022 SIGMOD 5.0618143e-05
6,468 Explain3D: Explaining Disagreements in Disjoint Datasets 2019 VLDB 5.0448709e-05
6,527 Automatic Rule Refinement for Information Extraction 2010 VLDB 5.0200332e-05
6,572 EFQ: Why-Not Answer Polynomials in Action 2015 VLDB 5.0010375e-05
6,700 Approximate Summaries for Why and Why-not Provenance 2020 VLDB 4.9534371e-05
6,947 TRAMP: Understanding the Behavior of Schema Mappings through Provenance 2010 VLDB 4.8869805e-05
6,974 NLProveNAns: Natural Language Provenance for Non-Answers 2018 VLDB 4.8725777e-05
7,172 Summarized Causal Explanations For Aggregate Views 2024 SIGMOD 4.8068645e-05
7,562 Efficient Recovery of Missing Events 2013 VLDB 4.7057229e-05
7,678 To Not Miss the Forest for the Trees - A Holistic Approach for Explaining Missing Answers over Nested Data 2021 SIGMOD 4.6768157e-05
7,858 Fixed It For You: Protocol Repair Using Lineage Graphs 2019 CIDR 4.6301072e-05
8,142 Erebus: Explaining the Outputs of Data Streaming Queries 2023 VLDB 4.5724134e-05
8,154 Why Not Match: On Explanations of Event Pattern Queries 2021 SIGMOD 4.5708988e-05
8,228 You Say 'What', I Hear 'Where' and 'Why' - (Mis-)Interpreting SQL to Derive Fine-Grained Provenance 2018 VLDB 4.549777e-05
8,339 SlabCity: Whole-Query Optimization using Program Synthesis 2023 VLDB 4.5383933e-05
8,388 FEDEX: An Explainability Framework for Data Exploration Steps 2022 VLDB 4.525436e-05
8,958 Understanding Queries by Conditional Instances 2022 SIGMOD 4.417947e-05
9,218 QOCO: A Query Oriented Data Cleaning System with Oracles 2015 VLDB 4.3672293e-05
9,644 Fair and Actionable Causal Prescription Ruleset 2025 SIGMOD 4.3067693e-05
9,703 Debugging Missing Answers for Spark Queries over Nested Data with Breadcrumb 2021 VLDB 4.2964668e-05
9,768 DPXPlain: Privately Explaining Aggregate Query Answers 2023 VLDB 4.2815042e-05
9,920 ProvCite: Provenance-based Data Citation 2019 VLDB 4.250874e-05
10,269 Database Views as Explanations for Relational Deep Learning 2026 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
10,289 Efficient Query Repair for Aggregate Constraints 2026 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
10,404 SHARQ: Explainability Framework for Association Rules on Relational Data 2025 SIGMOD 4.1905499e-05
10,747 Finding Convincing Views to Endorse a Claim 2025 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
11,474 On Optimizing the Trade-off between Privacy and Utility in Data Provenance 2021 SIGMOD 4.1905499e-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
103 ULDBs: Databases with Uncertainty and Lineage 2006 VLDB 0.00049520051
149 Trio: A System for Integrated Management of Data, Accuracy, and Lineage 2005 CIDR 0.00041085859
561 An Annotation Management System for Relational Databases 2004 VLDB 0.00020099434
593 Lineage Tracing for General Data Warehouse Transformations 2001 VLDB 0.0001952223
647 Verifying Completeness of Relational Query Results in Data Publishing 2005 SIGMOD 0.00018706644
653 On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data 2008 VLDB 0.00018616975
676 Archiving Scientific Data 2002 SIGMOD 0.00018266498
1,412 VisTrails: Visualization meets Data Management 2006 SIGMOD 0.00012112718
4,163 Trio-One: Layering Uncertainty and Lineage on a Conventional DBMS 2007 CIDR 6.3861705e-05
5,854 Tracing Lineage Beyond Relational Operators 2007 VLDB 5.2982313e-05
Previous Page 1 / 1 Next

Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank Paper Year Venue Pagerank
2,655 Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases 2016 VLDB 8.3638668e-05
8,228 You Say 'What', I Hear 'Where' and 'Why' - (Mis-)Interpreting SQL to Derive Fine-Grained Provenance 2018 VLDB 4.549777e-05
3,100 Answering Why-not Questions on Reverse Top-k Queries 2015 VLDB 7.5625111e-05
5,428 High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies 2015 PODS 5.5125084e-05
6,572 EFQ: Why-Not Answer Polynomials in Action 2015 VLDB 5.0010375e-05
6,974 NLProveNAns: Natural Language Provenance for Non-Answers 2018 VLDB 4.8725777e-05
5,743 Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples 2019 SIGMOD 5.3432106e-05
943 A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries 2014 SIGMOD 0.00015140995
653 On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data 2008 VLDB 0.00018616975
1,124 How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions 2010 SIGMOD 0.00013832959