An Initial Investigation into Querying an Untrustworthy and Inconsistent Web

The Semantic Web is bound to be untrustworthy and inconsistent. In this paper, we present an initial approach for obtaining useful information in such an environment. In particular, we replace the question of whether an assertion is entailed by the entire Semantic Web with two other queries. The first asks if a specific statement is entailed given an identification of the trusted documents. The second asks for the document sets that entail a specific statement. We propose a mechanism for efficiently computing and representing the contexts of the statements and managing inconsistency. This system could be seen as a component in an overall trust system.