Measuring and Computing Database Inconsistency via Repairs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a numerical measure for quantifying database inconsistency based on repair semantics, and demonstrates its computability through answer-set programming, enhancing the analysis of data integrity issues.

Contribution

It proposes a novel inconsistency measure grounded in repair semantics and provides a method to compute it using answer-set programming, advancing database inconsistency analysis.

Findings

The inconsistency measure can be effectively computed via answer-set programs.

The measure is based on cardinality-repairs, providing a quantitative assessment.

The approach generalizes existing methods for evaluating database inconsistency.

Abstract

We propose a generic numerical measure of inconsistency of a database with respect to a set of integrity constraints. It is based on an abstract repair semantics. A particular inconsistency measure associated to cardinality-repairs is investigated; and we show that it can be computed via answer-set programs. Keywords: Integrity constraints in databases, inconsistent databases, database repairs, inconsistency measure.