Link integrity for the Semantic Web

The usefulness and usability of data on the Semantic Web is ultimately reliant on the ability of clients to retrieve Resource Description Framework (RDF) data from the Web. When RDF data is unavailable clients reliant on that data may either fail to function entirely or behave incorrectly. As a result there is a need to investigate and develop techniques that aim to ensure that some data is still retrievable, even in the event that the primary source of the data is unavailable. Since this problem is essentially the classic link integrity problem from hypermedia and the Web we look at the range of techniques that have been suggested by past research and attempt to adapt these to the Semantic Web. Having studied past research we identified two potentially promising strategies for solving the problem: 1) Replication and Preservation; and 2) Recovery. Using techniques developed to implement these strategies for hypermedia and the Web as a starting point we designed our own implementations which adapted these appropriately for the Semantic Web. We describe the design, implementation and evaluation of our adaptations before going on to discuss the implications of the usage of such techniques. In this research we show that such approaches can be used to successfully apply link integrity to the Semantic Web for a variety of datasets on the Semantic Web but that further research is needed before such solutions can be widely deployed.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo