Provenance Calculus and Possibilistic Logic: A Parallel and a Discussion

Abstract

Provenance calculus has been introduced, about fifteen years ago, for complementing relational algebra calculations in databases, with semiring operations in order to handle data lineage, incomplete or probabilistic information. Possibilistic logic has started to be developed twenty years before, initially for dealing with epistemic uncertainty, using the max-min semiring. Since then, several variants and generalizations of possibilistic logic have been proposed, involving various semirings. All these forms of possibilistic logic are surveyed and paralleled with provenance calculus, through logical counterparts of relational algebra operations. The paper ends with a discussion of the parallel between the two research trends.