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: 4291
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2010
Pagerank: 0.00013573466
Overall Rank: 856 | 94.13%
DOI: 10.1145/1807167.1807172

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Quoc Trung Tran (National University of Singapore)
2. Chee-Yong Chan (National University of Singapore)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{tran_sigmod10,
        title = {{How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions}},
        author = {Tran, Quoc Trung and Chan, Chee-Yong},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '10},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/1807167.1807172},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1807167.1807172},
        year = {2010}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 32 of 32 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
605	The Complexity of Causality and Responsibility for Query Answers and non-Answers	2011	VLDB	0.00015839628
2,432	Tracing Data Errors with View-Conditioned Causality	2011	SIGMOD	8.5870067e-05
2,570	Query-Oriented Data Cleaning with Oracles	2015	SIGMOD	8.4061164e-05
2,584	Complaint-driven Training Data Debugging for Query 2.0	2020	SIGMOD	8.3783546e-05
2,807	Data Provenance at Internet Scale: Architecture, Experiences, and the Road Ahead	2017	CIDR	8.1009158e-05
2,895	Answering Why-not Questions on Reverse Top-k Queries	2015	VLDB	7.9829449e-05
3,127	Toward Computational Fact-Checking	2014	VLDB	7.7308958e-05
3,991	The Complexity of Resilience and Responsibility for Self-Join-Free Conjunctive Queries	2016	VLDB	6.9695922e-05
4,076	A Probabilistic Optimization Framework for the Empty-Answer Problem	2013	VLDB	6.9221203e-05
4,638	Going Beyond Provenance: Explaining Query Answers with Pattern-based Counterbalances	2019	SIGMOD	6.5919801e-05
4,644	Reverse Engineering SPJ-Queries from Examples	2017	PODS	6.5901073e-05
4,670	New Results for the Complexity of Resilience for Binary Conjunctive Queries with Self-Joins	2020	PODS	6.5734205e-05
4,747	High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies	2015	PODS	6.5252099e-05
4,759	Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples	2019	SIGMOD	6.5207388e-05
4,890	Descriptive and Prescriptive Data Cleaning	2014	SIGMOD	6.4590072e-05
4,959	QFix: Diagnosing Errors through Query Histories	2017	SIGMOD	6.4283324e-05
5,278	Why Not Yet: Fixing a Top-k Ranking that Is Not Fair to Individuals	2023	VLDB	6.2856584e-05
5,937	Perturbation Analysis of Database Queries	2016	VLDB	6.0350628e-05
6,293	Query Refinement for Diversity Constraint Satisfaction	2024	VLDB	5.9247942e-05
6,360	Approximate Summaries for Why and Why-not Provenance	2020	VLDB	5.9009081e-05
6,389	Query Refinement for Diverse Top-k Selection	2024	SIGMOD	5.8895166e-05
6,461	Explain3D: Explaining Disagreements in Disjoint Datasets	2019	VLDB	5.8718966e-05
7,257	EFQ: Why-Not Answer Polynomials in Action	2015	VLDB	5.661841e-05
7,748	To Not Miss the Forest for the Trees - A Holistic Approach for Explaining Missing Answers over Nested Data	2021	SIGMOD	5.5528084e-05
8,388	Why Not Match: On Explanations of Event Pattern Queries	2021	SIGMOD	5.4364073e-05
8,719	DPXPlain: Privately Explaining Aggregate Query Answers	2023	VLDB	5.3774243e-05
8,970	Understanding Queries by Conditional Instances	2022	SIGMOD	5.3422757e-05
10,576	Efficient Query Repair for Aggregate Constraints	2026	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,493	Erica: Query Refinement for Diversity Constraint Satisfaction	2023	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,787	SPARQL Rewriting: Towards Desired Results	2020	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,854	Answering Why-questions by Exemplars in Attributed Graphs	2019	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,960	Constraint-based Explanation and Repair of Filter-based Transformations	2018	VLDB	5.093636e-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
314	Making Database Systems Usable	2007	SIGMOD	0.00021574636
385	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD	0.00019455743
517	Query by Output	2009	SIGMOD	0.00017169735
585	Lineage Tracing for General Data Warehouse Transformations	2001	VLDB	0.00016139897
628	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB	0.00015630285
700	Explaining differences in multidimensional aggregates	1999	VLDB	0.00014871032
1,636	Relaxing Join and Selection Queries	2006	VLDB	0.00010156479
1,939	iMAP: Discovering Complex Semantic Matches between Database Schemas	2004	SIGMOD	9.4490491e-05
2,358	Artemis: A System for Analyzing Missing Answers	2009	VLDB	8.6996414e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	9,193	Query-Guided Resolution in Uncertain Databases	2023	SIGMOD
2	663	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD
3	2,195	Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases	2016	VLDB
4	7,257	EFQ: Why-Not Answer Polynomials in Action	2015	VLDB
5	2,895	Answering Why-not Questions on Reverse Top-k Queries	2015	VLDB
6	5,396	Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs	2021	SIGMOD
7	4,759	Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples	2019	SIGMOD
8	4,747	High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies	2015	PODS
9	628	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB
10	385	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD