DSNotify - Detecting and Fixing Broken Links in Linked Data Sets

The Linking Open Data (LOD) initiative has motivated numerous institutions to publish their data on the Web and to interlink them with those of other data sources. But since LOD sources are subject to change, links between resources can break and lead to processing errors in applications that consume linked data. The current practice is to ignore this problem and leave it to the applications what to do when broken links are detected. We believe, however, that LOD data sources should provide the highest possible degree of link integrity in order to relieve applications from this issue, similar to databases that provide mechanisms to preserve referential integrity in their data. As a possible solution, we propose DSNotify, an add-on for LOD sources that detects broken links and assists the data source in fixing them, e.g., when resources were moved to other Web locations.