Automatic key selection for data linking

Abstract

The paper proposes an RDF key ranking approach that attempts to close the gap between automatic key discovery and data linking approaches and thus reduce the user effort in linking configuration. Indeed, data linking tool configuration is a laborious process, where the user is often required to select manually the properties to compare, which supposes an in-depth expert knowledge of the data. Key discovery techniques attempt to facilitate this task, but in a number of cases do not fully succeed, due to the large number of keys produced, lacking a confidence indicator. Since keys are extracted from each dataset independently, their effectiveness for the matching task, involving two datasets, is undermined. The approach proposed in this work suggests to unlock the potential of both key discovery techniques and data linking tools by providing to the user a limited number of merged and ranked keys, wellsuited to a particular matching task. In addition, the complementarity properties of a small number of top-ranked keys is explored, showing that their combined use improves significantly the recall. We report our experiments on data from the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative, as well as on real-world benchmark data about music.