Reexamining Some Holy Grails of Data Provenance

We reconsider some of the explicit and implicit properties that underlie well-established definitions of data provenance semantics. Previous work on comparing provenance semantics has mostly focused on expressive power (does the provenance generated by a certain semantics subsume the provenance generated by other semantics) and on understanding whether a semantics is insensitive to query rewrite (i.e., do equivalent queries have the same provenance). In contrast, we try to investigate why certain semantics possess specific properties (like insensitivity) and whether these properties are always desirable. We present a new property stability with respect to query language extension that, to the best of our knowledge, has not been isolated and studied on its own.

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