Abstract
The increasing amount of interlinked RDF data has finally made available the necessary building blocks for the web of data. This in turns makes it possible (and interesting) to query such a collection of graphs as an open and decentralized knowledge base. However, despite the fact that there are already implementations of query answering algorithms for the web of data, there is no formal characterization of what a satisfactory answer is expected to be. In this paper, we propose a preliminary model for such an open collection of graphs which goes beyond the standard single-graph RDF semantics, describes three different ways in which a query can be answered, and characterizes them semantically in terms of three incremental restrictions on the relation between the domain of interpretation of each single component graph. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.