Provenance in Open Data Entity-centric Aggregation

Recently an increasing number of open data catalogs appear on the Web. These catalogs contain data that represents real world entities and their attributes. Entities can be imported from several catalogs to build web services; hence there is a need to trace the source of each entity and attribute value in a way that handles also the possible conflicts between attribute values coming from overlapping sources. For open data, source tracing requires capturing both the provenance of the attribute values and the identity links between entities. We present here a new entity-centric source tracing model that extends an incremental import process and implements a conflict avoidance strategy.