Exchange-Repairs: Managing Inconsistency in Data Exchange

In a data exchange setting with target constraints, it is often the case that a given source instance has no solutions. Intuitively, this happens when data sources contain inconsistent or conflicting information that is exposed by the target constraints at hand. In such cases, the semantics of target queries trivialize, because the certain answers of every target query over the given source instance evaluate to “true”. The aim of this paper is to introduce and explore a new framework that gives meaningful semantics in such cases by using the notion of exchange-repairs. Informally, an exchange-repair of a source instance is another source instance that differs minimally from the first, but has a solution. In turn, exchange-repairs give rise to a natural notion of exchange-repair certain answers (in short, XR-certain answers) for target queries in the context of data exchange with target constraints.