Briefs

Stanford Report, March 20, 2006, BY DAVID ORENSTEIN

The Trio database system, developed by Professor Jennifer Widom and her research team, can account for the uncertainty of data and its sourcing.

This much is sure: Information is sometimes uncertain and sources are sometimes flawed. A new prototype database system created at Stanford is the first to have both data uncertainty and lineage (sourcing) built in, a development that could enable diverse applications such as tracking wildlife, improving Internet comparison shopping and even fighting crime.

"There is the question of how many people have not acknowledged uncertainty in their data because they didn't have a database system that could handle it," Widom says. Her team describes a prototype of their system in the March 2006 issue of the IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin.

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