The MEPDaW workshop series targets one of the emerging and fundamental problems of the Web, specifically the management and preservation of evolving knowledge graphs. During the past seven years, the workshop series has been gathering a community of researchers and practitioners around these challenges. To date, the series has successfully published more than 35 articles allowing more than 50 individual authors to present and share their ideas. This 7th edition, virtually co-located with the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2021), gathered the community around six research publications and one invited keynote presentation. The event took place online on the 25th of October, 2021.
There is a vast and rapidly increasing quantity of scientific, corporate,
government, and crowd-sourced data openly published on the Web. Open Data
plays a catalyst role in the way structured information is exploited on a large
scale. A traditional view of digitally preserving these datasets by “pickling and
locking them away” for future use, like groceries, conflicts with their evolution.
There are several approaches and frameworks (e.g. Linked Data Stack [
dataset) [
The seventh edition of this workshop was organised for the second time at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) and followed the structure of the previous editions. We invited a number of experts in the field of Linked Data and Data Evolution & Preservation in order to suggest and advise on the diferent topics that our workshop covered this year. This year, at ISWC 2022, we successfully gathered more than 50 participants for our half-day event. In line with most academic events, this year MEPDaW was held as a virtual event and we had to re-think the interactions between participants.
The workshop started with the keynote entitled “How can we fix the Web of Data?” given by Prof. Katja Hose3 from the Department of Computer Science of the Aalborg University (Denmark). She initiated her presentation from the observation that Semantic Web practitioners typically consider the Web of Data as a static corpus of information always available and unmutable; however, “in real life settings”, a broad range of problems hits the practitioners such as unavailability of entire knowledge graphs or dead-links for the associated SPARQL endpoints. And more generally, the current Semantic Web tools and paradigms (almost-) completely miss the concept of versioning and provenance of metadata. During her keynote, Professor Hose highlighted some of the solutions her group developed to mitigate these problems. She first showed how to keep knowledge available for continuous and scalable querying. Then, she presented the attendees an approach that enables community-driven updates so that mistakes can be corrected or missing information can be added. And finally, she described how learning from RDF archiving can be done using solutions to better support evolving knowledge graphs. Overall, this keynote [2] gave the audience in-depth details on practical (and industrial) use cases backed by cutting-edge research techniques.
The first article presented dealt with an approach which helps SPARQL practitioners to know which SPARQL endpoints has been updated when they run complex pipelines relying on several RDF sources [1]. It was followed by [5] which proposes the use of a visual interface to explore and fix multi-dimensional metadata bases, in particular she showed how she will apply these ideas in the context of popular music data during her PhD. Finally, the first paper-session ended-up with the presentation of TrieDF [3]: a solution to index metadataaugmented RDF datasets inspired by the trie data structure.
The second session started with an industrial talk from J. Fernández who described how clinical data standards at Roche benefit from RDF version management.The next efort [6] focused on provided the audience with several application use-cases where our the eforts of our community could contribute to. 3 http://people.cs.aau.dk/~khose/About_me.html Finally, the last article of the workshop described UpLOD [4], a tool to repair broken links in the linked-open data.
– Fabrizio Orlandi, ADAPT SFI Centre, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland – Damien Graux, Inria, Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, I3S, France – Julio Cesar dos Reis, Inst. of Computing, Univ. of Campinas, Brazil – Maria-Esther Vidal, TIB, Hannover, Germany
– Philippe Cudré-Mauroux, eXascale Infolab, Univ. of Fribourg, Switzerland – Jeremy Debattista, TopQuadrant Inc – Javier D. Fernández, Information Architect at Roche, Switzerland – Fabien Gandon, Inria, Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, I3S, France – Axel Polleres, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria Programme Committee
We would like to thank all the authors, reviewers, committee members and the speakers for their contributions, support and commitment.
These research activities were conducted with the financial support of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 713567 at the ADAPT SFI Research Centre at Trinity College Dublin. The ADAPT SFI Centre for Digital Media Technology is funded by Science Foundation Ireland through the SFI Research Centres Programme and is co-funded under the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through Grant #13/RC/2106_P2.