On Provenance of Queries on Semantic Web Data

Capturing trustworthiness, reputation, and reliability of Semantic Web data manipulated by SPARQL requires researchers to represent adequate provenance information, usually modeled as source data annotations and propagated to query results along with a query evaluation. Alternatively, abstract provenance models can capture the relationship between query results and source data by taking into account the employed query operators. The authors argue the benefits of the latter for settings in which query results are materialized in several repositories and analyzed by multiple users. They also investigate how relational provenance models can be leveraged for SPARQL queries, and advocate for new provenance models.