10^(10^6) Worlds and Beyond: Efficient Representation and Processing of Incomplete Information

Current systems and formalisms for representing incomplete information generally suffer from at least one of two weaknesses. Either they are not strong enough for representing results of simple queries, or the handling and processing of the data, e.g. for query evaluation, is intractable. In this paper, we present a decomposition-based approach to addressing this problem. We introduce world-set decompositions (WSDs), a space-efficient formalism for representing any finite set of possible worlds over relational databases. WSDs are therefore a strong representation system for any relational query language. We study the problem of efficiently evaluating relational algebra queries on sets of worlds represented by WSDs. We also evaluate our technique experimentally in a large census data scenario and show that it is both scalable and efficient.