A decentralized infrastructure for the efficient management of resources in the web of data

Abstract

A key requirement in linking open data refers to the rendering of such data easy to explore and consume. Such a requirement is critical for the overall quality of linked data in terms of consistency and interlinking. Although the provision of dereferenceable URIs is a step towards the right direction, current status of the semantic web indicates that such a feature alone is not enough. After all, as Berners Lee stressed, a URI is just an identifier for a resource not a recipe for its retrieval. In this paper, a decentralized infrastructure is presented capable of efficiently managing the URIs that are being consumed within the web of data. The proposed work is based on the registry, a place where triplestores may store information about their local URI entities. Such information evolves around backlinks that are defined as the references that are made from triples of remote triplestores to the locally defined URIs of a given triplestore. The registries communicate with each other through a lightweight protocol that facilitates the management and retrieval of URI entities across the LOD cloud.