A possible world approach to uncertain relational data
Ander de Keijzer, Maurice van Keulen · 2004
Data exchange between embedded systems and other small or large computing devices increases. Since data in differ-ent data sources may refer to the same real world objects, data cannot simply be merged. Furthermore, in many situ-ations, conflicts in data about the same real world objects need to be resolved without interference from a user. In this paper, we report on an attempt to make a RDBMS proba-bilistic, i.e., data in a relation represents all possible views on the real world, in order to achieve unattended data inte-gration. We define a probabilistic relational data model and review standard SQL query primitives in the light of proba-bilistic data. It appears that thinking in terms of ‘possible worlds ’ is powerful in determining the proper semantics of these query primitives. 1