Tracing lineage of array data

Arrays are a common and important class of data. They can model digital images, digital video, scientific and experimentation data, matrices, finite element grids, and many other types of data. Although array manipulations are diverse and domain-specific, they often exhibit structural regularities. The paper presents an algorithm called SUN-pushdown to compute data lineage in such array computations. The array manipulations are expressed in the Array Manipulation Language (AML) that was introduced previously (A.P. Marathe and K. Salem, 1997). SUB-pushdown has several useful features. First, the lineage computation is expressed as an AML query. Second, it is not necessary to evaluate the AML lineage query to compute the array data lineage. Third, SUB-pushdown never gives false-negative answers. SUB-pushdown has been implemented as part of the ArrayDB prototype array database system that we built (A.P. Marathe, 2001).