Sorted neighborhood for schema-free RDF data

Abstract

Entity Resolution (ER) concerns identifying pairs of entities that refer to the same underlying entity. To avoid O(n2) pairwise comparison of n entities, blocking methods are used. Sorted Neighborhood is an established blocking method for Relational Databases. It has not been applied to schema-free Resource Description Framework (RDF) data sources widely prevalent in the Linked Data ecosystem. This paper presents a Sorted Neighborhood workflow that may be applied to schemafree RDF data. The workflow is modular and makes minimal assumptions about its inputs. Empirical evaluations of the proposed algorithm on five real-world benchmarks demonstrate its utility compared to two state-of-the-art blocking baselines.