Approximate Summaries for Why and Why-not Provenance

Summary: Proposes approximate summarization of why/why-not provenance via pattern encodings to compress provenance. Adds sampling for scalable capture and concise, informative summaries on large datasets, balancing informativeness, conciseness, and completeness. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h3118698af090827c
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2020
Pagerank: 5.7686627e-05
Overall Rank: 6,486 | 56.40%
DOI: 10.14778/3380750.3380760

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Seokki Lee (Illinois Institute of Technology)
2. Bertram Ludäscher (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
3. Boris Glavic (Illinois Institute of Technology)

BibTeX Citation

@article{lee_vldb20,
        title = {{Approximate Summaries for Why and Why-not Provenance}},
        author = {Lee, Seokki and Ludäscher, Bertram and Glavic, Boris},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '20},
        volume = {13},
        number = {6},
        pages = {912--924},
        doi = {10.14778/3380750.3380760},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3380750.3380760},
        year = {2020}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
5,529	Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs	2021	SIGMOD	6.0935553e-05
5,793	Banzhaf Values for Facts in Query Answering	2024	SIGMOD	5.9930101e-05
8,495	Provenance-based Data Skipping	2022	VLDB	5.3304338e-05
8,539	Why Not Match: On Explanations of Event Pattern Queries	2021	SIGMOD	5.3200136e-05
10,625	Causal Explanations for Disparate Trends: Where and Why?	2026	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
10,739	Database Views as Explanations for Relational Deep Learning	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,135	Unified Lineage System: Tracking Data Provenance at Scale	2025	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
11,515	Counterfactual Explanation at Will, with Zero Privacy Leakage	2024	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 14 of 14 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
17	Provenance Semirings	2007	PODS	0.00059752575
189	Scorpion: Explaining Away Outliers in Aggregate Queries	2013	VLDB	0.00025840026
255	The History of Histograms (abridged)	2003	VLDB	0.00022981861
391	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD	0.00019238698
622	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB	0.00015484312
670	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD	0.00014954494
791	How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions	2010	SIGMOD	0.00013976192
878	Interpretable and Informative Explanations of Outcomes	2015	VLDB	0.00013302631
1,610	Efficient Provenance Storage	2008	SIGMOD	0.00010076616
2,067	Explaining Missing Answers to SPJUA Queries	2010	VLDB	9.0924963e-05
2,686	Data X-Ray: A Diagnostic Tool for Data Errors	2015	SIGMOD	8.1308928e-05
4,840	High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies	2015	PODS	6.3858476e-05
9,468	InsightNotes: Summary-Based Annotation Management in Relational Databases	2014	SIGMOD	5.1716372e-05
12,237	Provenance Summaries for Answers and Non-Answers	2018	VLDB	4.9793485e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	8,275	The Complexity of Why-Provenance for Datalog Queries	2024	PODS
2	11,975	On Optimizing the Trade-off between Privacy and Utility in Data Provenance	2021	SIGMOD
3	2,843	Data Provenance at Internet Scale: Architecture, Experiences, and the Road Ahead	2017	CIDR
4	8,583	OneProvenance: Efficient Extraction of Dynamic Coarse-Grained Provenance From Database Query Event Logs	2023	VLDB
5	6,457	On Provenance Minimization	2011	PODS
6	622	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB
7	4,687	Provenance for Natural Language Queries	2017	VLDB
8	10,879	Computing Why-Provenance for Property Graph Queries	2026	VLDB
9	7,234	Hypothetical Reasoning via Provenance Abstraction	2019	SIGMOD
10	12,237	Provenance Summaries for Answers and Non-Answers	2018	VLDB