Discovering and Maintaining Links on the Web of Data

摘要

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 fulfill 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 recom-putation. The interplay of all the components is demonstrated within a life science use case.