The Crowd and the Web of Linked Data: A Provenance Perspective

The usefulness of intelligent applications/services reasoning with linked data is dependent on the availability and correctness of this data. The crowd potentially has an important role to play in performing the non-trivial tasks of creating, validating, and maintaining the online linked data sets used by applications and services. Additional information captured within a provenance record can be used in these tasks and others, such as evaluating the performance of the crowd and its members. In this paper we describe two roles for the crowd in the web of linked data (creation and maintenance), and argue that incorporating provenance into these tasks is beneficial especially in scenarios when the population of available workers is small. We also identify several challenges for the use of provenance in this context and define a set of requirements for a provenance model to address these challenges.