Capturing the Age of Linked Open Data: Towards a Dataset-Independent Framework

An increasing amount of data are published and consumed on the Web according to the Linked Data paradigm. In such scenario, understanding if the data consumed are up-to-date is crucial. Outdated data are usually considered inappropriate for many crucial tasks, such as make the consumer confident that answers returned to a query are still valid at the time the query is formulated. In this paper we present a first dataset-independent framework for assessing currency of Linked Open Data (LOD) graphs. Starting from the analysis of the 8,713,282 triples containing temporal metadata in the billion triple challenge 2011, we investigate which vocabularies are used to represent versioning metadata, we defined Onto Currency, an ontology that integrates the most frequent properties used in this domain, and supports the collection of metadata from datasets that use different vocabularies. The proposed framework uses this ontology to assess the currency of an RDF graph/statement, by extrapolating it from the currency of the documents that describe the resources occurring in the graphs (statement). The approach has been implemented and evaluated in two different scenarios. © 2012 IEEE.