Interactive Data Repairing: the FALCON Dive

In this paper we discuss Falcon, an interactive, deterministic, and declarative data cleaning system. Unlike traditional rule-based system, Falcon does not rely on the existence of a set of pre-defined data quality rules, but it encourages users to explore the data, identify possible problems, and make updates to fix them. The main technical challenge consists in finding a set of rules, expressed as sql update queries, that are semantically correct and that fixes the largest number of errors in the data. Falcon navigates the lattice by interacting with users to gradually checking the correctness of a set of rules. We have conducted extensive experiments using both real-world and synthetic datasets to show that Falcon can effectively communicate with users in data repairing.