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: 0.00013976192
Overall Rank: 791 | 94.69%
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
578	The Complexity of Causality and Responsibility for Query Answers and non-Answers	2011	VLDB	0.00016096504
2,458	Tracing Data Errors with View-Conditioned Causality	2011	SIGMOD	8.4371456e-05
2,504	Query-Oriented Data Cleaning with Oracles	2015	SIGMOD	8.3782213e-05
2,598	Complaint-driven Training Data Debugging for Query 2.0	2020	SIGMOD	8.2385793e-05
2,843	Data Provenance at Internet Scale: Architecture, Experiences, and the Road Ahead	2017	CIDR	7.9491056e-05
2,955	Answering Why-not Questions on Reverse Top-k Queries	2015	VLDB	7.8102237e-05
3,178	Toward Computational Fact-Checking	2014	VLDB	7.5655186e-05
4,062	The Complexity of Resilience and Responsibility for Self-Join-Free Conjunctive Queries	2016	VLDB	6.8247395e-05
4,165	A Probabilistic Optimization Framework for the Empty-Answer Problem	2013	VLDB	6.7675283e-05
4,327	Query Refinement for Diversity Constraint Satisfaction	2024	VLDB	6.6632438e-05
4,660	Reverse Engineering SPJ-Queries from Examples	2017	PODS	6.4822086e-05
4,739	Going Beyond Provenance: Explaining Query Answers with Pattern-based Counterbalances	2019	SIGMOD	6.4441962e-05
4,747	New Results for the Complexity of Resilience for Binary Conjunctive Queries with Self-Joins	2020	PODS	6.4374568e-05
4,827	QFix: Diagnosing Errors through Query Histories	2017	SIGMOD	6.3917868e-05
4,840	High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies	2015	PODS	6.3858476e-05
4,847	Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples	2019	SIGMOD	6.3823876e-05
4,998	Descriptive and Prescriptive Data Cleaning	2014	SIGMOD	6.3207886e-05
5,353	Why Not Yet: Fixing a Top-k Ranking that Is Not Fair to Individuals	2023	VLDB	6.1637765e-05
6,056	Perturbation Analysis of Database Queries	2016	VLDB	5.9016482e-05
6,486	Approximate Summaries for Why and Why-not Provenance	2020	VLDB	5.7686627e-05
6,520	Query Refinement for Diverse Top-k Selection	2024	SIGMOD	5.7573717e-05
6,600	Explain3D: Explaining Disagreements in Disjoint Datasets	2019	VLDB	5.7403306e-05
7,407	EFQ: Why-Not Answer Polynomials in Action	2015	VLDB	5.534824e-05
7,879	To Not Miss the Forest for the Trees - A Holistic Approach for Explaining Missing Answers over Nested Data	2021	SIGMOD	5.4341576e-05
8,539	Why Not Match: On Explanations of Event Pattern Queries	2021	SIGMOD	5.3200136e-05
8,881	DPXPlain: Privately Explaining Aggregate Query Answers	2023	VLDB	5.2567693e-05
9,061	Understanding Queries by Conditional Instances	2022	SIGMOD	5.2289882e-05
10,803	Efficient Query Repair for Aggregate Constraints	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,013	Q-ACER: Query Aggregate Constraint Efficient Repair System	2026	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,802	Erica: Query Refinement for Diversity Constraint Satisfaction	2023	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
12,089	SPARQL Rewriting: Towards Desired Results	2020	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
12,154	Answering Why-questions by Exemplars in Attributed Graphs	2019	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
12,258	Constraint-based Explanation and Repair of Filter-based Transformations	2018	VLDB	4.9793485e-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
319	Making Database Systems Usable	2007	SIGMOD	0.00021164857
391	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD	0.00019238698
518	Query by Output	2009	SIGMOD	0.00016944862
591	Lineage Tracing for General Data Warehouse Transformations	2001	VLDB	0.00015888097
622	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB	0.00015484312
700	Explaining differences in multidimensional aggregates	1999	VLDB	0.00014681669
1,643	Relaxing Join and Selection Queries	2006	VLDB	0.00010006399
1,958	iMAP: Discovering Complex Semantic Matches between Database Schemas	2004	SIGMOD	9.3145711e-05
2,360	Artemis: A System for Analyzing Missing Answers	2009	VLDB	8.5770202e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	9,373	Query-Guided Resolution in Uncertain Databases	2023	SIGMOD
2	670	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD
3	2,222	Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases	2016	VLDB
4	7,407	EFQ: Why-Not Answer Polynomials in Action	2015	VLDB
5	2,955	Answering Why-not Questions on Reverse Top-k Queries	2015	VLDB
6	5,529	Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs	2021	SIGMOD
7	4,847	Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples	2019	SIGMOD
8	4,840	High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies	2015	PODS
9	622	On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data	2008	VLDB
10	391	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD