Noname manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Leveraging Data Lineage to Infer Logical Relationships between Astronomical Catalogs

Abstract A novel method to infer logical relationships between sets is pre-sented. These sets can be any collection of elements, for example astronomical catalogs of celestial objects. The method does not require the contents of the sets to be known explicitly. It combines incomplete knowledge about the relationships between sets to infer a priori unknown relationships. Relation-ships between sets are represented by sets of Boolean hypercubes. This leads to deductive reasoning by application of logical operators to these sets of hy-percubes. A pseudocode for an efficient implementation is described. The method is used in the Astro-WISE information system to infer rela-tionships between catalogs of astronomical objects. These catalogs can be very large and, more importantly, their contents do not have to be available at all times. Science products are stored in Astro-WISE with references to other sci-ence products from which they are derived, or their dependencies. This creates full data lineage that links every science product all the way back to the raw data. Catalogs are created in a way that maximizes knowledge about their relationship with their dependencies. The presented algorithm is used to de-termine which objects a catalog represents by leveraging this information