The quality of empirical statistical studies is tightly related to the quality and amount of source data available. However, it is often hard to collect data from several sources due to privacy requirements or a lack of trust. In this paper, we propose a novel way to combine secure multi-party computation technology with federated database systems to preserve privacy in statistical studies that...

Sensor networks almost by definition present complex issues related to data quality. This is especially true for networks of mobile devices because of higher potential for data loss and errors. Moreover, the physical context, especially location, plays a very important role for mobile devices and must be considered when trying to interpret the sensor readings. The traditional approach to dealin...

We study the computational complexity of auditing finite attributes in databases allowing statistical queries. Given a database that supports statistical queries, the auditing problem is to check whether an attribute can be completely determined or not from a given set of statistical information. Some restricted cases of this problem have been investigated earlier, e.g. the complexity of statis...

We are grateful to Luis Gravano and Hector Garcia-Molina of Stanford University for providing us with the database and query collections used in 6]. (This report discussed how to estimate the database usefulness used deened in this paper for the high-correlation and disjoint scenarios. Such discussion did not appear in 6].)

In this paper we describe a visual, ontology-based query paradigm. It has two novel features: visually specifying aggregate table queries and table layout in a single process, and providing users with an ontology guide for formulating statistical data analysis tasks as table queries which are composed of the terms defined in ontologies. We describe the role of the fundamental concept of ontolog...

In this paper we present a conceptual data model, called SDM, which is able to represent the relationships between elementary and statistical data at a conceptual level. SDM borrows elements from research both in Object Oriented Databases and in Knowledge Representation. In addition it has suitable mechanisms to form classes of individuals by classifying the instances of a target class accordin...

Queries such as database similarity searches return results satisfying certain properties of distances or scores. For domain scientists, the absolute values of scores are seldom sufficient. Statistical significance or p-value of the result is a more useful criterion. This can be computed using an appropriate model of random objects. The problem of computing p-values becomes more acute when quer...

A privacy-preserving statistical database enables the data analyst to learn properties of the population as a whole, while protecting the privacy of the individuals whose data were used in creating the database. A rigorous treatment of privacy requires definitions: What constitutes a failure to preserve privacy? What is the power of the adversary whose goal it is to compromise privacy? What aux...

Modern bibliographic databases provide the basis for scientific research and its evaluation. While their content and structure differ substantially, there exist only informal notions on their reliability. Here we compare the topological consistency of citation networks extracted from six popular bibliographic databases including Web of Science, CiteSeer and arXiv.org. The networks are assessed ...

We study the impact of scale on data representation from both the modelling and querying points of view. While our starting point was geographical applications, statistical databases also address this problem of data representation at various levels of abstraction. From these requirements, we propose a model which allows: (i) database querying without exact knowledge of the data abstraction lev...