No Arabic abstract
Provenance is information about the origin, derivation, ownership, or history of an object. It has recently been studied extensively in scientific databases and other settings due to its importance in helping scientists judge data validity, quality and integrity. However, most models of provenance have been stated as ad hoc definitions motivated by informal concepts such as comes from, influences, produces, or depends on. These models lack clear formalizations describing in what sense the definitions capture these intuitive concepts. This makes it difficult to compare approaches, evaluate their effectiveness, or argue about their validity. We introduce provenance traces, a general form of provenance for the nested relational calculus (NRC), a core database query language. Provenance traces can be thought of as concrete data structures representing the operational semantics derivation of a computation; they are related to the traces that have been used in self-adjusting computation, but differ in important respects. We define a tracing operational semantics for NRC queries that produces both an ordinary result and a trace of the execution. We show that three pre-existing forms of provenance for the NRC can be extracted from provenance traces. Moreover, traces satisfy two semantic guarantees: consistency, meaning that the traces describe what actually happened during execution, and fidelity, meaning that the traces explain how the expression would behave if the input were changed. These guarantees are much stronger than those contemplated for previous approaches to provenance; thus, provenance traces provide a general semantic foundation for comparing and unifying models of provenance in databases.
Provenance is an increasing concern due to the ongoing revolution in sharing and processing scientific data on the Web and in other computer systems. It is proposed that many computer systems will need to become provenance-aware in order to provide satisfactory accountability, reproducibility, and trust for scientific or other high-value data. To date, there is not a consensus concerning appropriate formal models or security properties for provenance. In previous work, we introduced a formal framework for provenance security and proposed formal definitions of properties called disclosure and obfuscation. In this article, we study refined notions of positive and negative disclosure and obfuscation in a concrete setting, that of a general-purpose programing language. Previous models of provenance have focused on special-purpose languages such as workflows and database queries. We consider a higher-order, functional language with sums, products, and recursive types and functions, and equip it with a tracing semantics in which traces themselves can be replayed as computations. We present an annotation-propagation framework that supports many provenance views over traces, including standard forms of provenance studied previously. We investigate some relationships among provenance views and develop some partial solutions to the disclosure and obfuscation problems, including correct algorithms for disclosure and positive obfuscation based on trace slicing.
For data-centric systems, provenance tracking is particularly important when the system is open and decentralised, such as the Web of Linked Data. In this paper, a concise but expressive calculus which models data updates is presented. The calculus is used to provide an operational semantics for a system where data and updates interact concurrently. The operational semantics of the calculus also tracks the provenance of data with respect to updates. This provides a new formal semantics extending provenance diagrams which takes into account the execution of processes in a concurrent setting. Moreover, a sound and complete model for the calculus based on ideals of series-parallel DAGs is provided. The notion of provenance introduced can be used as a subjective indicator of the quality of data in concurrent interacting systems.
The ubiquitous use of machine learning algorithms brings new challenges to traditional database problems such as incremental view update. Much effort is being put in better understanding and debugging machine learning models, as well as in identifying and repairing errors in training datasets. Our focus is on how to assist these activities when they have to retrain the machine learning model after removing problematic training samples in cleaning or selecting different subsets of training data for interpretability. This paper presents an efficient provenance-based approach, PrIU, and its optimized version, PrIU-opt, for incrementally updating model parameters without sacrificing prediction accuracy. We prove the correctness and convergence of the incrementally updated model parameters, and validate it experimentally. Experimental results show that up to two orders of magnitude speed-ups can be achieved by PrIU-opt compared to simply retraining the model from scratch, yet obtaining highly similar models.
Nondeterminism in scheduling is the cardinal reason for difficulty in proving correctness of concurrent programs. A powerful proof strategy was recently proposed [6] to show the correctness of such programs. The approach captured data-flow dependencies among the instructions of an interleaved and error-free execution of threads. These data-flow dependencies were represented by an inductive data-flow graph (iDFG), which, in a nutshell, denotes a set of executions of the concurrent program that gave rise to the discovered data-flow dependencies. The iDFGs were further transformed in to alternative finite automatons (AFAs) in order to utilize efficient automata-theoretic tools to solve the problem. In this paper, we give a novel and efficient algorithm to directly construct AFAs that capture the data-flow dependencies in a concurrent program execution. We implemented the algorithm in a tool called ProofTraPar to prove the correctness of finite state cyclic programs under the sequentially consistent memory model. Our results are encouranging and compare favorably to existing state-of-the-art tools.
XML database query languages have been studied extensively, but XML database updates have received relatively little attention, and pose many challenges to language design. We are developing an XML update language called Flux, which stands for FunctionaL Updates for XML, drawing upon ideas from functional programming languages. In prior work, we have introduced a core language for Flux with a clear operational semantics and a sound, decidable static type system based on regular expression types. Our initial proposal had several limitations. First, it lacked support for recursive types or update procedures. Second, although a high-level source language can easily be translated to the core language, it is difficult to propagate meaningful type errors from the core language back to the source. Third, certain updates are well-formed yet contain path errors, or ``dead subexpressions which never do any useful work. It would be useful to detect path errors, since they often represent errors or optimization opportunities. In this paper, we address all three limitations. Specifically, we present an improved, sound type system that handles recursion. We also formalize a source update language and give a translation to the core language that preserves and reflects typability. We also develop a path-error analysis (a form of dead-code analysis) for updates.