Contextualization of an RDF Knowledge Base in the Vikef Project

Due to the simplicity of RDF data model and semantics, complex application scenarios in which RDF is used to represent the application data model raise important design issues. Modelling e.g. the temporary evolution, relevance, trust and provenance in Knowledge Bases require more than just a set of universally true statements, without any reference to a situation, a point in time, or generally a context. Our proposed solution is to use the notion of context to separate statements that refer to different contextual information, which could so far not explicitly be tied to the statements. In this paper we describe a practical solution to this problem, which has been implemented in the VIKEF project, which deals with making explicit and intelligently useable information contained in vast collections of documents, databases and metadata repositories. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.