The Web of Linked Data is the cumulation of over a decade of work by the Web standards community in their effort to make data more Web-like. We provide an introduction to the Web of Linked Data from the perspective of a Web developer that would like
to build an application using Linked Data. We identify a weakness in the development stack as being a lack of domain specific scripting languages for designing background processes that consume Linked Data. To address this weakness, we design a scripting language with a simple but appropriate type system. In our proposed architecture some data is consumed from sources outside of the control of the system and some data is held locally. Stronger type assumptions can be made about the local data than external data, hence our type system mixes static and dynamic typing. Throughout, we relate our work to the W3C recommendations that drive Linked Data, so our syntax is accessible to Web developers.
For data-centric systems, provenance tracking is particularly important when the system is open and decentralised, such as the Web of Linked Data. In this paper, a concise but expressive calculus which models data updates is presented. The calculus i
s used to provide an operational semantics for a system where data and updates interact concurrently. The operational semantics of the calculus also tracks the provenance of data with respect to updates. This provides a new formal semantics extending provenance diagrams which takes into account the execution of processes in a concurrent setting. Moreover, a sound and complete model for the calculus based on ideals of series-parallel DAGs is provided. The notion of provenance introduced can be used as a subjective indicator of the quality of data in concurrent interacting systems.
