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: 4206
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2009
Pagerank: 0.00019455743
Overall Rank: 385 | 97.37%
DOI: 10.1145/1559845.1559901

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Adriane Chapman (The MITRE Corporation)
2. H.V. Jagadish (University of Michigan)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{chapman_sigmod09,
        title = {{Why Not?}},
        author = {Chapman, Adriane and Jagadish, H.V.},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '09},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/1559845.1559901},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1559845.1559901},
        year = {2009}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 52 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
11,960	Constraint-based Explanation and Repair of Filter-based Transformations	2018	VLDB	5.093636e-05
12,069	YASK: A Why-Not Question Answering Engine for Spatial Keyword Query Services	2016	VLDB	5.093636e-05

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
78	ULDBs: Databases with Uncertainty and Lineage	2006	VLDB	0.00036571789
125	Trio: A System for Integrated Management of Data, Accuracy, and Lineage	2005	CIDR	0.00030932014
531	An Annotation Management System for Relational Databases	2004	VLDB	0.00017083233
585	Lineage Tracing for General Data Warehouse Transformations	2001	VLDB	0.00016139897
617	Verifying Completeness of Relational Query Results in Data Publishing	2005	SIGMOD	0.00015711988
628	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB	0.00015630285
701	Archiving Scientific Data	2002	SIGMOD	0.00014870915
1,475	VisTrails: Visualization meets Data Management	2006	SIGMOD	0.00010662942
4,147	Trio-One: Layering Uncertainty and Lineage on a Conventional DBMS	2007	CIDR	6.8720637e-05
6,351	Tracing Lineage Beyond Relational Operators	2007	VLDB	5.9042919e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	2,195	Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases	2016	VLDB
2	8,145	You Say ‘What’, I Hear ‘Where’ and ‘Why’ — (Mis-)Interpreting SQL to Derive Fine-Grained Provenance	2018	VLDB
3	2,895	Answering Why-not Questions on Reverse Top-k Queries	2015	VLDB
4	4,747	High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies	2015	PODS
5	7,257	EFQ: Why-Not Answer Polynomials in Action	2015	VLDB
6	7,175	NLProveNAns: Natural Language Provenance for Non-Answers	2018	VLDB
7	4,759	Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples	2019	SIGMOD
8	663	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD
9	628	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB
10	856	How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions	2010	SIGMOD