Expressing machine-interpretable statements in the form of subject-predicate-object triples is a well-established practice for capturing semantics of structured data. However, the standard used for representing these triples, RDF, inherently lacks the mechanism to attach provenance data, which would be crucial to make automatically generated and/or processed data authoritative. This paper is a critical review of data models, annotation frameworks, knowledge organization systems, serialization syntaxes, and algebras that enable provenance-aware RDF statements. The various approaches are assessed in terms of standard compliance, formal semantics, tuple type, vocabulary term usage, blank nodes, provenance granularity, and scalability. This can be used to advance existing solutions and help implementers to select the most suitable approach (or a combination of approaches) for their applications. Moreover, the analysis of the mechanisms and their limitations highlighted in this paper can serve as the basis for novel approaches in RDF-powered applications with increasing provenance needs.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.