Visualizing How-Provenance Explanations for SPARQL Queries

Abstract

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are vast collections of machine-readable information, usually modeled in RDF and queried with SPARQL. KGs have opened the door to a plethora of applications such as Web search or smart assistants that query and process the knowledge contained in those KGs. An important, but often disregarded, aspect of querying KGs is query provenance: explanations of the data sources and transformations that made a query result possible. In this article we demonstrate, through a Web application, the capabilities of SPARQLprov, an engine-agnostic method that annotates query results with how-provenance annotations. To this end, SPARQLprov resorts to query rewriting techniques, which make it applicable to already deployed SPARQL endpoints. We describe the principles behind SPARQLprov and discuss perspectives on visualizing how-provenance explanations for SPARQL queries.