Data exchange has been widely used in big data era. One challenge for data exchange is to identify the true cause of data errors during the... Show moreData exchange has been widely used in big data era. One challenge for data exchange is to identify the true cause of data errors during the schema translation. The huge amount of data and schemas make it nearly impossible to find “the” correct solution. Vagabond system is developed to address this problem and use best-effort methods to rank data exchange error explanations base on the likelihood that they are the correct solutions. Ranking done on scoring functions that model some aspects of explanation sets. Examples of these properties include complexity(size of explana- tion), and side effect size(number of correct data values that will be affected by the changes). The thesis introduced three new scoring functions to increase the applicability of Vagabond under various data exchange scenarios. We prove that the monotonicity property required by Vagabond may not hold for some of the new scoring functions, so a new generic ranker is also introduced to efficiently rank error explanations for these new scoring functions as well as for future scoring functions that have boundary property. We can efficiently compute upper or lower bounds on the score of partial solutions. We also completed some performance experiments on the new scoring functions and the new ranker. The experiment result proves that the new scoring functions introduced in this thesis have a scalable performance. M.S. in Computer Science, May 2014 Show less