CSE alumna Adriane Chapman recognized with Test of Time Award from ACM SIGMOD

Alumna Adriane Chapman (CSE MS PhD ’06 ’08) has been recognized with the prestigious ACM SIGMOD Test of Time Award for her influential paper on techniques for recording provenance for data that is copied among databases. Now a research scientist at MITRE, Dr. Chapman published the paper while a PhD student at Michigan. She shares the award with co-authors Drs. Peter Buneman and James Cheney, both of the University of Edinburgh, UK.

The SIGMOD Test of Time Award recognizes the best paper from the SIGMOD proceedings 10 years prior, based on the criterion of identifying the paper that has had the most impact (research, products, methodology) over the intervening decade.

Their paper, “Provenance Management in Curated Databases,” addresses the fact that curated databases in bioinformatics and other disciplines are the result of a great deal of manual annotation, correction, and transfer of data from other sources. Provenance information concerning the creation, attribution, or version history of such data is crucial for assessing its integrity and scientific value, yet general purpose database systems provide little support for tracking provenance, especially when data moves among databases.

The researchers’ paper investigates general-purpose techniques for recording provenance for data that is copied among databases. They describe an approach in which they track the user’s actions while browsing source databases and copying data into a curated database, in order to record the user’s actions in a convenient, queryable form. They present an implementation of this technique and use it to evaluate the feasibility of database support for provenance management. Their experiments show that although the overhead of a naive approach is fairly high, it can be decreased to an acceptable level using simple optimizations.

Dr. Adriane Chapman is a specialist in information management and database technologies. She received a BS in Biology and a BS in Chemistry from MIT (1998) and earned her PhD in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan in 2008 under the guidance of Prof. HV Jagadish. She has been an active researcher in provenance since 2003, and is a leader of the Provenance Week conferences. At MITRE, she is a task leader for government projects and runs several research projects spanning data quality, provenance, and health data exchange.