Decentralized Collaborative Knowledge Management using Git
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The World Wide Web and the Semantic Web are designed as a network of distributed services and datasets. The distributed character of the Web brings manifold collaborative possibilities for interchanging data. While the commonly adopted collaborative solutions for RDF data are centralized, such as SPARQL endpoints and wiki systems. To actually support distributed collaboration a system is needed, which supports divergence of datasets, brings the possibility to conflate diverged states and allows to synchronize different distributed datasets. We are presenting the Quit Stack inspired by and built on the successful Git system. The approach is based on a formal expression of evolution and consolidation of distributed datasets. During the collaborative curation process the system is automatically versioning the RDF dataset, and tracking provenance information. It is providing support for branching, merging and synchronizing distributed RDF datasets. The merging process is guarded by specific merge strategies for RDF data. Finally with our reference implementation we prove a reasonable performance and demonstrate the practical usability of the system.
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