Provenance summaries for answers and nonanswers

Explaining why an answer is (not) in the result of a query has proven to be of immense importance for many applications. However, why-not provenance, and to a lesser degree also why-provenance, can be very large, even for small input datasets. The resulting scalability and usability issues have limited the applicability of provenance. We present PUG, a system for why and why-not provenance that applies a range of novel techniques to overcome these challenges. Specifically, PUG limits provenance capture to what is relevant to explain a (missing) result of interest and uses an efficient sampling-based summarization method to produce compact explanations for (missing) answers. Using two real-world datasets, we demonstrate how a user can draw meaningful insights from explanations produced by PUG.