[Brown CS Talks] Brown CS Seminar: Wang-Chiew Tan in Lubrano on 3/20/02 at noon

[talks-admin@list.cs.brown.edu]

			      CS Seminar
		  
		  The Department of Computer Science
			   BROWN UNIVERSITY

			      
			       presents

			    Wang-Chiew Tan

		      University of Pennsylvania

		  Wednesday, March 20, 2002 at noon
	       Lubrano Conference Room (CIT 4th floor)
	       Refreshments will be served at 11:45 am
			       

   Where Did My Data Come From? Annotating and Archiving Databases


			       Abstract

Publishing data on the Web has revolutionized the way much scientific
research is conducted.  However, it also brings new problems and new
opportunities. Among the problems is that it is often difficult to
trace a piece of data to its source, since it may have moved through
several databases being transformed and edited on its journey from the
source.  Worse, the source may no longer exist!  Knowing the source
and provenance is essential for its scientific credibility.  Among the
opportunities is that scientists now want to annotate a data element
and to have their annotations spread to other people who look at the
same element.  This is related to provenance because the annotation
should ``spread'' back to the source and forward to other databases and
users.

This talk deals with two issues concerned with provenance.  I will
first examine the problem of propagating annotations through queries
and show a dichotomy of complexity for this problem.  In the second
part of the talk, I will describe a new technique for archiving data
that allows all versions of an evolving scientific database to be
stored and retrieved with very small overhead.


		     Host:  Professor Steve Reiss