Diachronic Linked Data: Towards Long-Term Preservation of Structured Interrelated Information

The Linked Data Paradigm is one of the most promising technologies for publishing, sharing, and connecting data on the Web, and offers a new way for data integration and interoperability. However, the proliferation of distributed, inter-connected sources of information and services on the Web poses significant new challenges for managing consistently a huge number of large datasets and their interdependencies. In this paper we focus on the key problem of preserving evolving structured interlinked data. We argue that a number of issues that hinder applications and users are related to the temporal aspect that is intrinsic in linked data. We present a number of real use cases to motivate our approach, we discuss the problems that occur, and propose a direction for a solution.