How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions

Summary: ConQueR introduces a new paradigm for why-not explanations: automatically generate a refined query that returns original results plus the missing tuple(s). Unlike prior models, it explains missing tuples by query refactoring rather than editing data. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 4229
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2010
Pagerank: 0.00013845652
Overall Rank: 1,125 | 92.18%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Quoc Trung Tran
2. Chee-Yong Chan

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 32 of 32 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
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
3,095	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
3,340	Toward Computational Fact-Checking	2014	VLDB	7.2030091e-05
4,361	The Complexity of Resilience and Responsibility for Self-Join-Free Conjunctive Queries	2016	VLDB	6.2559141e-05
4,636	Reverse Engineering SPJ-Queries from Examples	2017	PODS	6.0303761e-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
5,649	Query Refinement for Diverse Top-k Selection	2024	SIGMOD	5.3911246e-05
5,660	Descriptive and Prescriptive Data Cleaning	2014	SIGMOD	5.3847321e-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
5,934	Perturbation Analysis of Database Queries	2016	VLDB	5.266698e-05
6,475	Explain3D: Explaining Disagreements in Disjoint Datasets	2019	VLDB	5.0497183e-05
6,573	EFQ: Why-Not Answer Polynomials in Action	2015	VLDB	5.0058435e-05
6,643	Query Refinement for Diversity Constraint Satisfaction	2024	VLDB	4.9786132e-05
6,696	Approximate Summaries for Why and Why-not Provenance	2020	VLDB	4.9581958e-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
8,149	Why Not Match: On Explanations of Event Pattern Queries	2021	SIGMOD	4.5752863e-05
8,954	Understanding Queries by Conditional Instances	2022	SIGMOD	4.4221863e-05
9,766	DPXPlain: Privately Explaining Aggregate Query Answers	2023	VLDB	4.2856106e-05
10,277	Efficient Query Repair for Aggregate Constraints	2026	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
11,294	Erica: Query Refinement for Diversity Constraint Satisfaction	2023	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
11,592	SPARQL Rewriting: Towards Desired Results	2020	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
11,659	Answering Why-questions by Exemplars in Attributed Graphs	2019	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
11,754	Constraint-based Explanation and Repair of Filter-based Transformations	2018	VLDB	4.1945683e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
257	Making Database Systems Usable	2007	SIGMOD	0.00030223397
487	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD	0.00022050218
492	Query by Output	2009	SIGMOD	0.00021974699
611	Lineage Tracing for General Data Warehouse Transformations	2001	VLDB	0.00019231115
652	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB	0.00018634477
767	Explaining differences in multidimensional aggregates	1999	VLDB	0.00016981309
1,830	Relaxing Join and Selection Queries	2006	VLDB	0.000103862
2,174	iMAP: Discovering Complex Semantic Matches between Database Schemas	2004	SIGMOD	9.3672342e-05
2,790	Artemis: A System for Analyzing Missing Answers	2009	VLDB	8.1239026e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
9,043	Query-Guided Resolution in Uncertain Databases	2023	SIGMOD	4.4039656e-05
942	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD	0.00015155714
2,649	Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases	2016	VLDB	8.3719123e-05
6,573	EFQ: Why-Not Answer Polynomials in Action	2015	VLDB	5.0058435e-05
3,095	Answering Why-not Questions on Reverse Top-k Queries	2015	VLDB	7.5692859e-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
5,418	High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies	2015	PODS	5.5178123e-05
652	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB	0.00018634477
487	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD	0.00022050218