10106Worlds and Beyond: Efficient Representation and Processing of Incomplete Information

We present a decomposition-based approach to managing incomplete information. We introduce world-set decompositions (WSDs), a space-efficient and complete representation system for finite sets of worlds. We study the problem of efficiently evaluating relational algebra queries on world-sets represented by WSDs. We also evaluate our technique experimentally in a large census data scenario and show that it is both scalable and efficient.