A Relational Wrapper for RDF Reification

The importance of provenance information as a means to trust and validate the authenticity of available data cannot be stressed enough in today’s webenabled world. The abundance of data now accessible due to the Internet explosion brings with it the related issue of determining how much of it is trustworthy. Provenance information, such as who is responsible for the data or how the data came to be, assists in the process of verifying the authenticity of the data. Semantic web technologies such as Resource Description Framework (RDF) include the ability to record such provenance information through the process of reification. RDF’s popularity has resulted in a demand for modeling and visualization tools. The work presented in this paper, called R2D, attempts to address this demand by innovatively integrating existing, stable technologies such as relational systems with the newer web technologies such as RDF. The work in this paper extends our earlier work by adding support for the RDF concept of reification. Reification enables the association of a level of trust and confidence with RDF triples, thereby enabling the ranking/validation of the authenticity of the triples. Details of the algorithmic enhancements to the various components of R2D that were made to support RDF reification are presented along with performance graphs for queries executed on a database containing crime records data from a police department..