Coloring RDF Triples to Capture Provenance

Recently, the W3C Linking Open Data effort has boosted the publication and inter-linkage of large amounts of RDF datasets on the Semantic Web. Various ontologies and knowledge bases with millions of RDF triples from Wikipedia and other sources, mostly in e-science, have been created and are publicly available. Recording provenance information of RDF triples aggregated from different heterogeneous sources is crucial in order to effectively support trust mechanisms, digital rights and privacy policies. Managing provenance becomes even more important when we consider not only explicitly stated but also implicit triples (through RDFS inference rules) in conjunction with declarative languages for querying and updating RDF graphs. In this paper we rely on colored RDF triples represented as quadruples to capture and manipulate explicit provenance information.