An Initial Investigation into Querying an Untrustworthy and Inconsistent Web

Abstract. The Semantic Web is bound to be untrustworthy and inconsistent. In this paper, we present an initial approach for obtaining useful information in such an environment. In particular, we replace the question of whether an assertion is entailed by the entire Semantic Web with two other queries. The first asks if a statement is entailed if a set of documents is trusted. The second asks for the document sets that entail a specific statement. We propose a mechanism which leverages research on assumption-based truth maintenance systems to efficiently compute and represent the contexts of the statements and manage inconsistency. For these queries, our approach provides significant improvement over the naïve solution to the problem.