Abstract Ever since Tim Berners-Lee et al. introduced the

Semantic Web [1] in the Scientific American, the field has been drawing increasing attention. Data on the Semantic Web is typically represented in RDF. Implementing changes such as adding or deleting an element to a RDF file is difficult. Such changes cannot be executed in an ad hoc manner as they could possibly corrupt the data in the file due to the highly interrelated nature of the RDF statements contained within the file [4]. Sarkar presents five update operations [5], Add, InsertAfter, Delete, Remove, and Replace, which can be applied to an RDF file based on standard database theory and database update operations. This paper investigates the completeness of this set of update operations