Towards a Framework for Managing Evolving Information Resources on the Data Web

The web of data has brought forth the need to preserve and sustain evolving information within linked datasets; however, a basic requirement of data preservation is the maintenance of the datasets’ structural characteristics as well. As open data are often found using different and/or heterogeneous data models and schemata from one source to another, there is a need to reconcile these mismatches and provide common denominations of interpretation on a multitude of levels, in order to be able to preserve and manage the evolution of the generated resources. In this paper, we present a linked data approach for the preservation and archiving of open heterogeneous datasets that evolve through time, at both the structural and the semantic layer. We first propose a set of requirements for modelling evolving linked datasets. We then proceed on conceptualizing a modelling framework for evolving entities and place these in a 2x2 model space that consists of the semantic and the temporal dimensions.