Querying partially sound and complete data sources
Alberto O. Mendelzon, George A. Mihaila · 2001
When gathering data from multiple data sources, users need uniform, transparent access to data. Also, when extracting data from several independent, often only partially sound and complete data sources, it is useful to present users with meta-information about the confidence in the answer to a query, based on the number and quality of the sources that participated in constructing the answer. We consider the problem of querying collections of sources with incomplete and partially sound data. We provide a method for checking the consistency of a source collection, we give a tableaux-based characterization for the set of possible worlds consistent with a given source collection and we propose a probabilistic semantics for query answers.