Querying for provenance, trust, uncertainty and other meta knowledge in RDF

Abstract

The Semantic Web is based on accessing and reusing RDF data from many different-sources, which one may assign different levels of authority and credibility. Existing Semantic Web query languages, like SPARQL, have targeted the retrieval, combination and re-use of facts, but have so far ignored all aspects of meta knowledge, such as origins, authorship, recency or certainty of data. In this paper, we present an original, generic, formalized and implemented approach for managing many dimensions of meta knowledge, like source, authorship, certainty and others. The approach re-uses existing RDF modeling possibilities in order to represent meta knowledge. Then, it extends SPARQL query processing in such a way that given a SPARQL query for data, one may request meta knowledge without modifying the query proper. Thus, our approach achieves highly flexible and automatically coordinated querying for data and meta knowledge, while completely separating the two areas of concern.