Data provenance is any information about the origin of a piece of data and the process that led to its creation. Most database provenance work has focused on creating models and semantics to query and generate this provenance information. While comprehensive, provenance information remains large and overwhelming, making it hard for data provenance systems to support data exploration. We present a new approach to provenance exploration that builds on data summarization techniques. We contribute novel summarization schemes for the provenance of aggregation queries and techniques for the fast generation of these summarization schemes. We introduce two types of summaries for aggregate queries.Impact summariestake into account the impact of specific groups of tuples in the provenance of the query on an aggregate result, andcomparative summariesallow users to compare the provenance of two aggregate results. We also present algorithms for efficient computation of these summaries, implement optimizations using data sampling and feature selection, and conduct experiments and a user survey to show the feasibility and relevance of our approaches.

Data provenance is any information about the origin of a piece of data and the process that led to its creation. Most database provenance work has focused on creating models and semantics to query and generate this information. While comprehensive, provenance information remains large and overwhelming, which can make it hard for provenance systems to support data exploration. We present a new approach to provenance exploration that builds on data summarization techniques. We contribute two novel summarization schemes for the provenance of aggregation queries: Impact summaries, and comparative summaries. We show with experiments that our techniques incur little overhead compared to basic summaries. We conduct a survey to show that our approaches are useful to users.

Provenance information can be large and overwhelming to users. We present a set of criteria that any provenance exploration tool must have and introduce Pastwatch, a provenance exploration system that adheres to those criteria. We also address the issues associated with provenance of aggregation queries, including the creation of a summarization method that makes provenance of aggregation queries manageable for users. Finally, we conduct a quantitative user study to show statistically significant results that Pastwatch makes provenance information more efficient and easier to use than standard approaches.