This joint volume of proceedings gathers together papers from the 3rd Workshop on Managing the Evolution and Preservation of the Data Web (MEPDaW2017) and the 4th Workshop on Linked Data Quality (LDQ2017), held on the 28th and 29th of May of 2017 during the 14th ESWC conference in Portorozˇ, Slovenia. Managing the Evolution and Preservation of the Data Web
? Joint proceedings are publicly available in [
Preserving linked open datasets poses a number of challenges, mainly related to the nature of the Linked Data principles and the RDF data model. Since resources are globally interlinked, effective citation measures are required. Another challenge is to determine the consequences that changes to one LOD dataset may have to other datasets linked to it. The distributed nature of LOD datasets furthermore introduces additional complexity, since external sources that are being linked to may change or become unavailable. Finally, another challenge is to identify means to continuously assess the quality of dynamic datasets.
During last year’s workshop [
The 4th Linked Data Quality Workshop7 focuses on novel methodologies and frameworks for assessing, monitoring, maintaining, and improving the quality of Linked Data as well as to highlight tools and user interfaces which can effectively assist in its assessment and repair. In addition, the workshop seeks methodologies that help to identify the current impediments in building real-world Linked Data applications leveraging data and ontology quality, and use cases that reveal success stories or aspects that have been neglected so far. The benefits of addressing Linked Data quality issues will not only help in detecting inherent data quality problems currently plaguing Linked Data, but also provide the means to fix these problems and maintain the quality in the long run.
In this year’s contributions we see a focus on quality assessment and validation services, rather than client-side solutions. Since Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has known benefits, such as reduced consumer cost and increased ease of installation and use, the rise of Quality-Assessment-as-a-Service is promising.
Linked Data validation has been difficult so far because Linked Data schemas are not used as constraints, but for deriving new facts (i.e., entailment). The ongoing standardization of Linked Data validation languages such as SHACL8 and ShEX9 provides new opportunities for automating Linked Data quality assessment. It is promising to see that these standardization efforts have already resulted in novel Linked Data Quality approaches. Finally, the recent publication of a Linked Data Quality vocabulary by W3C10 makes it possible to represent and disseminate the results of quality assessment as Linked Open Data, which opens up new approaches as well.
This year we accepted three papers and invited a keynote speaker, which we
describe in brief. Mihindukulasooriya et al. [
Mc Gurk et al. [
Hashimoto et al. [
Pe´ter Kira´ly’s keynote discusses how metadata quality was performed in the Europeana use case. His talk shows the process of metadata quality assurance in big digital libraries, such as Europeana, the findings of the functional requirement analyses of Europeana records, the data quality analyzing framework built, as well as the general and specific metrics considered and the scalability issues raised.
We would like to thank the authors for their contribution and active participation in the workshops, and all the program committee members for reviewing the submissions and provide valuable feedback. We are also grateful to the organisers of the ESWC 2017 conference for their support, and our keynote speakers, Prof. Dr. Maria-Esther Vidal from the University of Bonn and Fraunhofer IAIS (Germany) and Pe´ter Kira´ly from the Gesellschaft fu¨r wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Go¨ttingen (Germany).
The MEPDaW workshop was co-organised by members funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): M1720-G11 and supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant 731601.