Dealing with Inconsistency in Databases: An Overview

There is a growing number of applications where inconsistent information arises. In the last two decades, the emerging approach for dealing with such scenarios is to “tolerate” inconsistency and provide appropriate reasoning mechanisms. In particular, consistent query answering has been widely accepted as a principled approach for query answering. Several practical and theoretical issues regarding the consistent query answering framework have been widely investigated in literature and different techniques for evaluating consistent answers have been proposed. In this work, we provide a brief survey of the research on techniques for repairing and querying inconsistent databases developed by the database research group of the DIMES Department at the University of Calabria.