Documenting the Creation, Manipulation and Evaluation of Links for Reuse and Reproducibility

Data integration is an essential task in the open world of the Semantic Web. Many approaches have been proposed that achieve such integration by linking related entities across data providers, but they lack the support for in-depth documentation of the involved processes such as the creation, manipulation and evaluation of links. As a consequence, detailed documentation that eases the understanding and reproducibility of underlying processes is needed for a reliable reuse of graphs of identity available in the Semantic Web. We present here an approach to document such links and their processes, building upon a representation we call VoID+. It enables link-publishers to provide data-users with information that better support them in accessing and using links. We show that our approach with the proposed VoID+ ontology allows us to address the relevant competency questions around the reuse of integrated Semantic Web data. We also demonstrate how our approach has been successfully implemented in the Lenticular Lens, a user interface tool that annotates links it discovers, manipulates or validates under user’s guidance. Based on a real-life humanities case study, we can show that the ontology amply annotates links in its life-cycle for reliable decision making by data-users.