R43ples: Revisions for Triples - An Approach for Version Control in the Semantic Web

For most use cases, the Semantic Web provides essential mechanisms to interlink data in a fast and efficient way. However, it is still not widely accepted in industry since some important features are not mature enough. Requirements include easier model transformation and access to dynamic data. One of the most missing important features is version control which would make it possible to record changes in a way that they can be rolled back at any time. Recent version control system are not very well integrated into the Semantic Web. This paper shows a novel way of dealing with version control for Linked Data. It presents R43ples as an approach using named graphs to semantically store the differences between revisions. Furthermore it allows direct access and manipulation of revisions with SPARQL. Thus, the access is almost transparent for the clients which can still use known SPARQL queries enhanced with some additional keywords. A prototypical implementation of the system shows a proof of concept and performance considerations.