View source for Discovering and Maintaining Links on the Web of Data

The Web of Data is built upon two simple ideas, Employ the RDF data model to publish structured data on the Web and to create explicit data links between entities within different data sources. This paper presents the Silk -- Linking Framework, a toolkit for discovering and maintaining data links between Web data sources. Silk consists of three components: 1. A link discovery engine, which computes links between data sources based on a declarative specification of the conditions that entities must fulfil in order to be interlinked; 2. A tool for evaluating the generated data links in order to fine-tune the linking specification; 3. A protocol for maintaining data links between continuously changing data sources. The protocol allows data sources to exchange both linksets as well as detailed change information and enables continuous link recomputation. The interplay of all the components is demonstrated within a life science use case.

Future work on Silk will focus on the following areas: We will implement further similarity metrics to support a broader range of linking use cases. To assist users in writing Silk-LSL specifications, machine learning techniques could be employed to adjust weightings or optimize the structure of the matching specification. Finally, we will evaluate the suitability of Silk for detecting duplicate entities within local datasets instead of using it to discover links between disparate RDF data sources. The value of the Web of Data rises and falls with the amount and the quality of links between data sources. We hope that Silk and other similar tools will help to strengthen the linkage between data sources and therefore contribute to the overall utility of the network.