Seminar: Language-integrated Provenance

Wher ProvenanceDate: 11:15, 3 October 2016

Venue: F.17. Colin Maclaurin Building, Heriot-Watt University

Title: Language-integrated Provenance

Speaker: Stefan Fehrenbach,  Informatics, University of Edinburgh

Abstract: Provenance, or information about the origin or derivation of data, is important for assessing the trustworthiness of data and identifying and correcting mistakes. Most prior implementations of data provenance have involved heavyweight modifications to database systems and little attention has been paid to how the provenance data can be used outside such a system. We present extensions to the Links programming language that build on its support for language-integrated query to support provenance queries by rewriting and normalizing monadic comprehensions and extending the type system to distinguish provenance metadata from normal data. We show that the two most common forms of provenance can be implemented efficiently and used safely as a programming language feature with no changes to the database system.

Bio: Stefan is a second year PhD student at the University of Edinburgh where he works with James Cheney on language support for provenance.