Managing Inconsistent Databases Using Active Integrity Constraints

Integrity constraints are a fundamental part of a database schema. They are generally used to define constraints on data (functional dependencies, inclusion dependencies, exclusion dependencies, etc.), and their enforcement ensures a semantically correct state of a database. As the presence of data inconsistent with respect to integrity constraints is not unusual, its management plays a key role in all the areas in which duplicate or conflicting information is likely to occur, such as database integration, data warehousing, and federated databases (Bry, 1997; Lin, 1996; Subrahmanian, 1994). It is well known that the presence of inconsistent data can be managed by “repairing” the database, that is, by providing consistent databases, obtained by a minimal set of update operations on the inconsistent original environment, or by consistently answering queries posed over the inconsistent database.