2014/08/05 by Harry Halpin, Halpin, Harry, James Cheney +1
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · #Databases (cs.DB) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Research Data Management Practices #Scientific Computing and Data Management #Semantic Web and Ontologies #cs.DB
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1408.0926
Pre-publication version of ISWC 2014 paper
arxiv created 2014/08/05 · openalex publication_date 2014/08/05 · arxiv updated 2014/08/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
While the Semantic Web currently can exhibit provenance information by using the W3C PROV standards, there is a "missing link" in connecting PROV to storing and querying for dynamic changes to RDF graphs using SPARQL. Solving this problem would be required for such clear use-cases as the creation of version control systems for RDF. While some provenance models and annotation techniques for storing and querying provenance data originally developed with databases or workflows in mind transfer readily to RDF and SPARQL, these techniques do not readily adapt to describing changes in dynamic RDF datasets over time. In this paper we explore how to adapt the dynamic copy-paste provenance model of Buneman et al. [2] to RDF datasets that change over time in response to SPARQL updates, how to represent the resulting provenance records themselves as RDF in a manner compatible with W3C PROV, and how the provenance information can be defined by reinterpreting SPARQL updates. The primary contribution of this paper is a semantic framework that enables the semantics of SPARQL Update to be used as the basis for a 'cut-and-paste' provenance model in a principled manner.