Silk - A Link Discovery Framework for the Web of Data

The Web of Data is built upon two simple ideas: Employ the RDF data model to publish structured data on the Web and to set explicit RDF links between entities within different data sources. This paper presents the Silk – Link Discovery Framework, a tool for finding relationships between entities within different data sources. Data publishers can use Silk to set RDF links from their data sources to other data sources on the Web. Silk features a declarative language for specifying which types of RDF links should be discovered between data sources as well as which conditions entities must fulfill in order to be interlinked. Link conditions may be based on various similarity metrics and can take the graph around entities into account, which is addressed using a path-based selector language. Silk accesses data sources over the SPARQL protocol and can thus be used without having to replicate datasets locally.