[Colloquium] Talk by James Cheney on Monday, April 16, 2007

[Margery Ishmael]

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE - TALK

Date: Monday, April 16, 2007
Time: 2:30 p.m.
Place: Ryerson 251 (1100 E. 58th St.)

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Speaker: JAMES CHENEY from Edinburgh University

Web page: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/jcheney/

Title: Provenance in Scientific Databases

Abstract:

Scientific results in many disciplines, especially biology, are now
being collected into large databases which support "in silico"
experiments.  Often, the databases are constructed by both manual
editing (or "curation") and automatic data extraction, mining, or
cleaning steps.  Because judgments of the quality of the data (and
therefore of the reliability of the results) ultimately rest on the
choices made by the database curators, it is essential to record
information called provenance which explains how the database came to be
the way it is.  Since it is tedious and expensive for curators to record
this information by hand, we study the problem of building provenance
tracking into the database system itself.

In this talk I will first present a simple, but effective approach to
provenance tracking for manually curated databases.  I will then present
recent work on the deeper issue of the expressiveness of
provenance-tracking techniques for traditional relational query and
update languages.  These results provide a formal basis for the
comparison of alternative approaches and provide useful semantic
guarantees about the behavior of provenance-tracking techniques.

***The talk will be followed by refreshments in Ryerson 255***

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Host:  David B. MacQueen

People in need of assistance should call 773-834-8977 in advance.

For information on future CS talks: http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/events


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