PDQ: proof-driven query answering over web-based data

The data needed to answer queries is often available through Web-based APIs. Indeed, for a given query there may be many Web-based sources which can be used to answer it, with the sources overlapping in their vocabularies, and differing in their access restrictions (required arguments) and cost. We introduce PDQ (Proof-Driven Query Answering), a system for determining a query plan in the presence of web-based sources. It is: (i) constraint-aware -- exploiting relationships between sources to rewrite an expensive query into a cheaper one, (ii) access-aware -- abiding by any access restrictions known in the sources, and (iii) cost-aware -- making use of any cost information that is available about services. PDQ takes the novel approach of generating query plans from proofs that a query is answerable. We demonstrate the use of PDQ and its effectiveness in generating low-cost plans.