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Data provenance tools capture the steps used to produce analyses. However, scientists must choose among work-flow provenance systems, which allow arbitrary code but only track provenance at the granularity of files; provenance APIs, which provide tuple-level provenance, but incur overhead in all computations; and database provenance tools, which track tuple-level provenance through relational operators and support optimization, but support a limited subset of data science tasks. None of these solutions are well suited for tracing errors introduced during common ETL, record alignment, and matching tasks – for data types such as strings, images, etc. Scientists need new capabilities to identify the sources of errors, find why different code versions produce different results, and identify which parameter values affect output. We propose PROVision, a provenance-driven troubleshooting tool that supports ETL and matching computations and traces extraction of content within data objects. PROVision extends database-style provenance techniques to capture equivalences, support optimizations, and enable selective evaluation. We formalize our extensions, implement them in the PROVision system, and validate their effectiveness and scalability for common ETL and matching tasks.

Data citation is of growing concern for owners of curated databases, who wish to give credit to the contributors and curators responsible for portions of the dataset and enable the data retrieved by a query to be later examined. While several databases specify how data should be cited, they leave it to users to manually construct the citations and do not generate them automatically. We report our experiences in automating data citation for an RDF dataset called eagle-i, and discuss how to generalize this to a citation framework that can work across a variety of different types of databases (e.g. relational, XML, and RDF). We also describe how a database administrator would use this framework to automate citation for a particular dataset.

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Scientific datasets associated with a research project can proliferate over time as a result of activities such as sharing datasets among collaborators, extending existing datasets with new measurements, and extracting subsets of data for analysis. As such datasets begin to accumulate, it becomes increasingly difficult for a scientist to keep track of their derivation history, which complicates data sharing, provenance tracking, and scientific reproducibility. Understanding what relationships exist between datasets can help scientists recall their original derivation history. For instance, if dataset A is contained in dataset B, then the connection between A and B could be that A was extended to create B.We present a relationship-identification methodology as a solution to this problem. To examine the feasibility of our approach, we articulated a set of relevant relationships, developed algorithms for efficient discovery of these relationships, and organized these algorithms into a new system called ReConnect to assist scientists in relationship discovery. We also evaluated existing alternative approaches that rely on flagging differences between two spreadsheets and found that they were impractical for many relationship-discovery tasks. Additionally, we conducted a user study, which showed that relationships do occur in real-world spreadsheets, and that ReConnect can improve scientists' ability to detect such relationships between datasets.The promising results of ReConnect's evaluation encouraged us to explore a ii more automated approach for relationship discovery. In this dissertation, we introduce an automated end-to-end prototype system, ReDiscover, that identifies, from a collection of datasets, the pairs that are most likely related, and the relationship between them. Our experimental results demonstrate the overall effectiveness of ReDiscover in predicting relationships in a scientist's or a small group of researchers' collections of datasets, and the sensitivity of the overall system to the performance of its various components.

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An increasing amount of information is being collected in structured, evolving, curated databases, driving the question of how information extracted from such datasets via queries should be cited. While several databases say how data should be cited for web-page views of the database, they leave it to users to manually construct the citations. Furthermore, they do not say how data extracted by queries other than web-page views -- general queries -- should be cited. This demo shows how citations can be specified for a small set of views of the database, and used to automatically generate citations for general queries against the database.

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