Causality in Databases: The Diagnosis and Repair Connections

In this work we establish and investigate the connections between causality for query answers in databases, database repairs wrt. denial constraints, and consistency-based diagnosis. The first two are relatively new problems in databases, and the third one is an established subject in knowledge representation. We show how to obtain database repairs from causes and the other way around. The vast body of research on database repairs can be applied to the newer problem of determining actual causes for query answers. By formulating a causality problem as a diagnosis problem, we manage to characterize causes in terms of a system’s diagnoses.