Automated Metadata Generation for Linked Data Generation and Publishing Workflows

Provenance and other metadata are essential for determining ownership and trust. Nevertheless, no systematic approaches were introduced so far in the Linked Data publishing workflow to capture them. Defining such metadata remained independent of the rdf data generation and publishing. In most cases, metadata is manually defined by the data publishers (person-agents), rather than produced by the involved applications (software-agents). Moreover, the generated rdf data and the published one are considered to be one and the same, which is not always the case, leading to pure, condense and often seductive information. This paper introduces an approach that relies on declarative descriptions of (i) mapping rules, specifying how the rdf data is generated, and of (ii) raw data access interfaces to automatically and incrementally generate provenance and metadata information. This way, it is assured that the metadata information is accurate, consistent and complete.