Using provenance in the Semantic Web

The Web is a decentralized system full of information provided by diverse open sources of varying quality. For any given question there will be a multitude of answers offered, raising the need for assessing their relative value and for making decisions about what sources to trust. In order to make effective use of the Web, we routinely evaluate the information we get by checking the sources that provided it and the processes that produced it. A trust layer was always present in the Web architecture, and Berners-Lee envisioned an “oh-yeah?” button in the browser to check the sources of an assertion. The Semantic Web raises these questions in the context of automated applications (e.g. reasoners, aggregators, or agents), whether trying to answer questions with the Linked Data cloud, using a mashup appropriately, or determining trust on a social network. Therefore, provenance is an important aspect of the Web that becomes crucial in Semantic Web research.