Julius Volz’s research while affiliated with Chemnitz University of Technology and other places

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 recomputation. The interplay of all the components is demonstrated within a life science use case.

The Web of Data is built upon two simple ideas: Employ the RDF data model to publish structured data on the Web and to set explicit RDF links between entities within different data sources. This paper presents the Silk – Link Discovery Framework, a tool for finding relationships between entities within different data sources. Data publishers can use Silk to set RDF links from their data sources to other data sources on the Web. Silk features a declarative language for specifying which types of RDF links should be discovered between data sources as well as which conditions entities must fulfill in order to be interlinked. Link conditions may be based on various similarity metrics and can take the graph around entities into account, which is addressed using a path-based selector language. Silk accesses data sources over the SPARQL protocol and can thus be used without having to replicate datasets locally.