Silk - A Link Discovery Framework for the Web of Data

Abstract

The Web of Linked Data is built upon two simple ideas: First, to employ the RDF data model to publish structured data on the Web. Second, to set explicit RDF links between data items within different data sources. The Silk link discovery framework supports developers in accomplishing the second task. Using a declarative language, developers can specify which types of RDF links are set between data items and which conditions data items must fulfil in order to be interlinked. Link conditions can combine various similarity metrics, aggregation and transformation functions. Link conditions may take the graph around a data items into account, which is addressed using an RDF path language. Silk accesses remote data sources via the SPARQL protocol and can be employed in situations where terms from different vocabularies are mixed and where no consistent RDFS or OWL schemata exist. The talk gives an overview about the Silk framework and explains how developers can use Silk to interlink their data with the data cloud that is published by the W3C Linking Open Data community effort.