Discovering and maintaining links on the Web of data

Abstract

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. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.