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ORION DBMS: Handling nebulous data

The ORION database system (previously known as U-DBMS), developed by the database group of Purdue University, is a state-of-the-art uncertain database management system with built-in support for probabilistic data as first class data types. In contrast to other uncertain databases, Orion supports both attribute and tuple uncertainty with arbitrary correlations. This enables the database engine to handle both discrete and continuous pdfs in a natural and accurate manner. The underlying model is closed under the basic relational operators and is consistent with Possible Worlds Semantics.

Probabilistic and uncertain data management have recently received much attention in the database community. Uncertainty is prevalent in numerous application domains, ranging from information extraction and integration to scientific data management and sensor databases. Orion is a general-purpose uncertain database system that unifies the modeling of probabilistic data across applications. This in turn provides additional opportunities to the database engine for indexing and optimization. It is built on top of PostgreSQL, an object-oriented relational open-source database system. The novel features of ORION are:

1. An integrated implementation of the "PDF Attributes" data model, which is consistent with Possible Worlds Semantics and supports both continuous and discrete uncertainty.
2. Efficient access methods for querying uncertain data, including three index structures based on R-trees, signature trees, and inverted indexes.
3. Improved query optimization, join algorithms, and selectivity estimation by gathering and exploiting additional statistics over probabilistic data types.
4. Integration with PL/R for graphical visualization of and statistical inference over uncertain data.

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No: IIS-0534702 , The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) and National Science Foundation (NSF) REU under Grant No. 0939724.

The image of Orion is taken by high schools students from Amtsgymnasiet I Sønderborg High School in Denmark. This picture is protected by Copyright and is available here. It is copied here with permission.

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Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF) or the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR).