Publishing and consuming provenance metadata on the web of linked data

Abstract

The World Wide Web evolves into a Web of Data, a huge, globally distributed dataspace that contains a rich body of machine-processable information from a virtually unbound set of providers covering a wide range of topics. However, due to the openness of the Web little is known about who created the data and how. The fact that a large amount of the data on the Web is derived by replication, query processing, modification, or merging raises concerns of information quality. Poor quality data may propagate quickly and contaminate the Web of Data. Provenance information about who created and published the data and how, provides the means for quality assessment. This paper takes a first step towards creating a quality-aware Web of Data: we present approaches to integrate provenance information into the Web of Data and we illustrate how this information can be consumed. In particular, we introduce a vocabulary to describe provenance of Web data as metadata and we discuss possibilities to make such provenance metadata accessible as part of the Web of Data. Furthermore, we describe how this metadata can be queried and consumed to identify outdated information. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.