Provenance-Aware Knowledge Representation: A Survey of Data Models and Contextualized Knowledge Graphs

• Published in: Data Science and Engineering Vol. 5; no. 3; pp. 293 - 316
• Main Authors: Sikos, Leslie F., Philp, Dean
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.09.2020; Springer; Springer Nature B.V; SpringerOpen
• Subjects: Algorithm Analysis and Problem Complexity; Annotations; Artificial Intelligence; Chemistry and Earth Sciences; Computer Science; Contextual knowledge graph; Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery; Data models; Database Management; Graphical representations; Knowledge bases (artificial intelligence); Knowledge representation; Physics; RDF data model; RDF provenance; RDF reification alternatives; Semantics; Statistics for Engineering; Surveys; Systems and Data Security; Web applications; Australia; New York; Israel; Contextual knowledge graph; RDF data model; RDF provenance; RDF reification alternatives
• ISSN: 2364-1185; 2364-1541
• DOI: 10.1007/s41019-020-00118-0

Expressing machine-interpretable statements in the form of subject-predicate-object triples is a well-established practice for capturing semantics of structured data. However, the standard used for representing these triples, RDF, inherently lacks the mechanism to attach provenance data, which would be crucial to make automatically generated and/or processed data authoritative. This paper is a critical review of data models, annotation frameworks, knowledge organization systems, serialization syntaxes, and algebras that enable provenance-aware RDF statements. The various approaches are assessed in terms of standard compliance, formal semantics, tuple type, vocabulary term usage, blank nodes, provenance granularity, and scalability. This can be used to advance existing solutions and help implementers to select the most suitable approach (or a combination of approaches) for their applications. Moreover, the analysis of the mechanisms and their limitations highlighted in this paper can serve as the basis for novel approaches in RDF-powered applications with increasing provenance needs.