MetaLink: A Travel Guide to the LOD Cloud

Abstract

Graph-based traversal is an important navigation paradigm for the Semantic Web, where datasets are interlinked to provide context. While following links may result in the discovery of complementary data sources and enriched query results, it is widely recognized that traversing the LOD Cloud indiscriminately results in low quality answers. Over the years, approaches have been published that help to determine whether links are trustworthy or not, based on certain criteria. While such approaches are often useful for specific datasets and/or in specific applications, they are not yet widely used in practice or at the scale of the entire LOD Cloud. This paper introduces a new resource called MetaLink. MetaLink is a dataset that contains metadata for a very large set of owl:sameAs links that are crawled from the LOD Cloud. MetaLink encodes a previously published error metric for each of these links. MetaLink is published in combination with LOD-a-lot, a dataset that is based on a large crawl of a subset of the LOD Cloud. By combining MetaLink and LOD-a-lot, applications are able to make informed decisions about whether or not to follow specific links on the LOD Cloud. This paper describes our approach for creating the MetaLink dataset. It describes the vocabulary that it uses and provides an overview of multiple real-world use cases in which the MetaLink dataset can solve non-trivial research and application challenges that were not addressed before.