Open Semantic Revision Control with R43ples: Extending SPARQL to access revisions of Named Graphs

Abstract

The Semantic Web provides mechanisms to interlink data in a fast and efficient way and build complex information networks. However, one of the most important features missing for industrial application is version control which allows recording changes and rolling them back at any time if necessary. It is not sufficiently supported by today's triplestores and recent version control systems are not very well integrated into the Semantic Web. This paper shows a way of dealing with version and revision control using SPARQL. It presents R43ples as an approach using named graphs for semantically storing the differences between revisions. Furthermore it allows a direct access and manipulation of revisions with extended version of SPARQL. Smart mechanisms for restoring old revisions relying on query rewriting provide a fast way of querying old revisions of big datasets. A prototypical implementation of the system prove an appropriate performance under different conditions.