III: Small: BeliefDB - Adding Belief Annotations to Databases

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

In many scientific disciplines today, a community of users is working together to assemble, revise, and curate a shared data repository. As the community accumulates knowledge and the database content evolves over time, it may contain conflicting information and members can disagree on the information it should store. Relational database management systems (RDBMS) today can help these communities manage their shared data, but provide limited support for managing conflicting facts and conflicting opinions about the correctness of the stored data. This project develops a Belief Database System (BeliefDB) that allows users to express belief annotations. These annotations can be positive (agreement) or negative (disagreement), and can be of higher order (belief annotations about other belief annotations). The approach allows users to have a structured discussion about the database content and annotations. A BeliefDB gives annotations a clearly defined semantics that lets a relational database understand and manage them efficiently. Intellectual merits: (i) Definition of a Belief Database Model: The project develops a formalism that extends a relational database with belief annotations on data and on previously inserted annotations. (ii) Design of a Belief Query Language: The project complements the data model with a new query language that extends SQL. (iii) Development of a canonical Belief Database Representation: The projects develops approaches to store and manipulate belief databases on top of a conventional RDBMS. Broader impact: Curated databases and shared data repositories are becoming widespread in the scientific communities. A BeliefDB provides a new data management system that addresses the need of these communities to manage conflicting data. If successful, the project will be one of the pieces that will help data management technology undergo a new paradigm shift, from managing data as content, to supporting a community of users in collaboratively creating partly conflicting database contents. For further information on the project see the project web page:: http://db.cs.washington.edu/beliefDB/