title: Linked data and provenance in biological data webs.
abstract: The Web is now being used as a platform for publishing and linking life science data. The Web's linking architecture can be exploited to join heterogeneous data from multiple sources. However, as data are frequently being updated in a decentralized environment, provenance information becomes critical to providing reliable and trustworthy services to scientists. This article presents design patterns for representing and querying provenance information relating to mapping links between heterogeneous data from sources in the domain of functional genomics. We illustrate the use of named resource description framework (RDF) graphs at different levels of granularity to make provenance assertions about linked data, and demonstrate that these assertions are sufficient to support requirements including data currency, integrity, evidential support and historical queries.
authors.affiliation: Image Bioinformatics Research Group, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, The Tinbergen Building, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PS, UK. jun.zhao@zoo.ox.ac.uk
authors.forename: Jun
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.forename: Alistair
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Miles
authors.forename: Graham
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Klyne
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Shotton
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D001695:Biology / Q000379:methods; D003625:Data Collection / Q000379:methods*; D003628:Database Management Systems; D016208:Databases, Factual; D006801:Humans; D033181:Information Dissemination; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D020407:Internet; D051188:Knowledge Bases; D012660:Semantics; D012984:Software; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled