Re: Provenance in RDF

Dave Reynolds wrote:

> We are working on a semantic web related application that needs some provenance
> support. We have various routes for doing this but would be interested in
> hearing of other's experiences. Are there any groups out there that have
> developed applications supporting provenance within RDF that would be willing to
> share their experiences on what worked well or badly?


Dave,

I've done a little work on this; I agree there's a variety of solutions
- for the moment I handle it out-of-band, associating statements with
times and authors etc programmatically. This seemed a pragmatic
solution, especially given uncertainty about reification, but as you
say, makes sharing the provenance via RDF problematic.

> We are exploring three approaches to doing this - application level, reification
> and out-of-band. Each of these has pros and cons.
> 
> ** Application level
> Treat provenance as a data modeling problem at the application level and
> introduce bNodes to which the provenance can be attached. Thus instead of:
>    subj --pred--> obj
> for any provenanced (is that a word? :-) values use:
>    subj --pred--> <> --rdf:value--> obj
>                      --pv:creator--> "Dave"
>                      --pv:date--> "27/2/02"

Presumably, for multiple creations; e.g. if John also states that triple
at a later date, you add another 'pred' property whose value is another
bNode, with another set of value, creator, date properties?

> For our current purposes we will simply pick one and work with it but if anyone
> else has already trodden this path and has experiences to share then we'd love
> to hear from them.

Cheers,

David Allsopp
QinetiQ

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Received on Wednesday, 27 February 2002 08:59:32 UTC