Completeness statements about RDF data sources and their use for query answering

With thousands of RDF data sources available on the Web covering disparate and possibly overlapping knowledge domains, the problem of providing high-level descriptions (in the form of metadata) of their content becomes crucial. In this paper we introduce a theoretical framework for describing data sources in terms of their completeness. We show how existing data sources can be described with completeness statements expressed in RDF. We then focus on the problem of the completeness of query answering over plain and RDFS data sources augmented with completeness statements. Finally, we present an extension of the completeness framework for federated data sources. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.