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: h74fe4d4fd3bb85cd
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2010
Pagerank: 0.00013929166
Overall Rank: 790 | 94.71%
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 33 of 33 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
581	The Complexity of Causality and Responsibility for Query Answers and non-Answers	2011	VLDB	0.00016042765
2,459	Tracing Data Errors with View-Conditioned Causality	2011	SIGMOD	8.4137923e-05
2,473	Complaint-driven Training Data Debugging for Query 2.0	2020	SIGMOD	8.3984284e-05
2,492	Query-Oriented Data Cleaning with Oracles	2015	SIGMOD	8.3722864e-05
2,847	Data Provenance at Internet Scale: Architecture, Experiences, and the Road Ahead	2017	CIDR	7.9235089e-05
2,975	Answering Why-not Questions on Reverse Top-k Queries	2015	VLDB	7.7807277e-05
3,183	Toward Computational Fact-Checking	2014	VLDB	7.5408249e-05
4,085	The Complexity of Resilience and Responsibility for Self-Join-Free Conjunctive Queries	2016	VLDB	6.7989526e-05
4,184	A Probabilistic Optimization Framework for the Empty-Answer Problem	2013	VLDB	6.7419575e-05
4,347	Query Refinement for Diversity Constraint Satisfaction	2024	VLDB	6.6380671e-05
4,665	Reverse Engineering SPJ-Queries from Examples	2017	PODS	6.4634883e-05
4,742	Going Beyond Provenance: Explaining Query Answers with Pattern-based Counterbalances	2019	SIGMOD	6.4285195e-05
4,769	New Results for the Complexity of Resilience for Binary Conjunctive Queries with Self-Joins	2020	PODS	6.4131333e-05
4,852	QFix: Diagnosing Errors through Query Histories	2017	SIGMOD	6.3680596e-05
4,865	High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies	2015	PODS	6.3619008e-05
4,871	Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples	2019	SIGMOD	6.3583165e-05
5,022	Descriptive and Prescriptive Data Cleaning	2014	SIGMOD	6.2989483e-05
5,374	Why Not Yet: Fixing a Top-k Ranking that Is Not Fair to Individuals	2023	VLDB	6.140487e-05
6,029	Perturbation Analysis of Database Queries	2016	VLDB	5.8912089e-05
6,502	Approximate Summaries for Why and Why-not Provenance	2020	VLDB	5.7468661e-05
6,534	Query Refinement for Diverse Top-k Selection	2024	SIGMOD	5.7356177e-05
6,608	Explain3D: Explaining Disagreements in Disjoint Datasets	2019	VLDB	5.7187078e-05
7,430	EFQ: Why-Not Answer Polynomials in Action	2015	VLDB	5.5139109e-05
7,901	To Not Miss the Forest for the Trees - A Holistic Approach for Explaining Missing Answers over Nested Data	2021	SIGMOD	5.4136249e-05
8,564	Why Not Match: On Explanations of Event Pattern Queries	2021	SIGMOD	5.2999122e-05
8,910	DPXPlain: Privately Explaining Aggregate Query Answers	2023	VLDB	5.2369069e-05
9,090	Understanding Queries by Conditional Instances	2022	SIGMOD	5.2092307e-05
10,874	Efficient Query Repair for Aggregate Constraints	2026	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
11,083	Q-ACER: Query Aggregate Constraint Efficient Repair System	2026	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
11,852	Erica: Query Refinement for Diversity Constraint Satisfaction	2023	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
12,139	SPARQL Rewriting: Towards Desired Results	2020	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
12,203	Answering Why-questions by Exemplars in Attributed Graphs	2019	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
12,307	Constraint-based Explanation and Repair of Filter-based Transformations	2018	VLDB	4.9605343e-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
321	Making Database Systems Usable	2007	SIGMOD	0.00021093212
389	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD	0.00019254758
520	Query by Output	2009	SIGMOD	0.00016910379
592	Lineage Tracing for General Data Warehouse Transformations	2001	VLDB	0.0001583562
624	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB	0.00015438077
700	Explaining differences in multidimensional aggregates	1999	VLDB	0.00014642224
1,649	Relaxing Join and Selection Queries	2006	VLDB	9.9699016e-05
1,967	iMAP: Discovering Complex Semantic Matches between Database Schemas	2004	SIGMOD	9.2816844e-05
2,371	Artemis: A System for Analyzing Missing Answers	2009	VLDB	8.5457987e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	9,408	Query-Guided Resolution in Uncertain Databases	2023	SIGMOD
2	672	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD
3	2,233	Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases	2016	VLDB
4	7,430	EFQ: Why-Not Answer Polynomials in Action	2015	VLDB
5	2,975	Answering Why-not Questions on Reverse Top-k Queries	2015	VLDB
6	5,556	Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs	2021	SIGMOD
7	4,871	Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples	2019	SIGMOD
8	4,865	High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies	2015	PODS
9	624	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB
10	389	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD