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: 4230
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2010
Pagerank: 0.00013832959
Overall Rank: 1,124 | 92.19%
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	0.00013851012
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
3,100	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
3,343	Toward Computational Fact-Checking	2014	VLDB	7.196079e-05
4,358	The Complexity of Resilience and Responsibility for Self-Join-Free Conjunctive Queries	2016	VLDB	6.2499e-05
4,636	Reverse Engineering SPJ-Queries from Examples	2017	PODS	6.0270157e-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
5,660	Query Refinement for Diverse Top-k Selection	2024	SIGMOD	5.3859487e-05
5,671	Descriptive and Prescriptive Data Cleaning	2014	SIGMOD	5.3797808e-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
5,935	Perturbation Analysis of Database Queries	2016	VLDB	5.2616521e-05
6,468	Explain3D: Explaining Disagreements in Disjoint Datasets	2019	VLDB	5.0448709e-05
6,572	EFQ: Why-Not Answer Polynomials in Action	2015	VLDB	5.0010375e-05
6,644	Query Refinement for Diversity Constraint Satisfaction	2024	VLDB	4.973836e-05
6,700	Approximate Summaries for Why and Why-not Provenance	2020	VLDB	4.9534371e-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
8,154	Why Not Match: On Explanations of Event Pattern Queries	2021	SIGMOD	4.5708988e-05
8,958	Understanding Queries by Conditional Instances	2022	SIGMOD	4.417947e-05
9,768	DPXPlain: Privately Explaining Aggregate Query Answers	2023	VLDB	4.2815042e-05
10,289	Efficient Query Repair for Aggregate Constraints	2026	VLDB	4.1905499e-05
11,296	Erica: Query Refinement for Diversity Constraint Satisfaction	2023	VLDB	4.1905499e-05
11,596	SPARQL Rewriting: Towards Desired Results	2020	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05
11,664	Answering Why-questions by Exemplars in Attributed Graphs	2019	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05
11,762	Constraint-based Explanation and Repair of Filter-based Transformations	2018	VLDB	4.1905499e-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	0.00030237174
487	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD	0.00022030123
491	Query by Output	2009	SIGMOD	0.00021960753
593	Lineage Tracing for General Data Warehouse Transformations	2001	VLDB	0.0001952223
653	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB	0.00018616975
762	Explaining differences in multidimensional aggregates	1999	VLDB	0.00016984985
1,830	Relaxing Join and Selection Queries	2006	VLDB	0.0001037611
2,183	iMAP: Discovering Complex Semantic Matches between Database Schemas	2004	SIGMOD	9.3584357e-05
2,794	Artemis: A System for Analyzing Missing Answers	2009	VLDB	8.1164685e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
9,043	Query-Guided Resolution in Uncertain Databases	2023	SIGMOD	4.3997447e-05
943	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD	0.00015140995
2,655	Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases	2016	VLDB	8.3638668e-05
6,572	EFQ: Why-Not Answer Polynomials in Action	2015	VLDB	5.0010375e-05
3,100	Answering Why-not Questions on Reverse Top-k Queries	2015	VLDB	7.5625111e-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
5,428	High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies	2015	PODS	5.5125084e-05
653	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB	0.00018616975
487	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD	0.00022030123