Re: ANN: Silk - Link Discovery Framework for the Web of Data released.

Chris Bizer wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> we are happy to announce the initial public release of 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. While there are 
> more and more tools available for publishing Linked Data on the Web, 
> there is still a lack of tools that support data publishers in setting 
> RDF links to other data sources on the Web. With the Silk - Link 
> Discovery Framework, we hope to contribute to filling this gap.
>
> Using the declarative Silk – Link Specification Language (Silk-LSL), 
> data publishers can specify which types of RDF links should be 
> discovered between data sources and which conditions data items must 
> fulfill in order to be interlinked. These link conditions can apply 
> different similarity metrics to multiple properties of an entity or 
> related entities which are addressed using a path-based selector 
> language. The resulting similarity scores can be weighted and combined 
> using various similarity aggregation functions. Silk accesses data 
> sources via the SPARQL protocol and can thus be used to discover links 
> between local and remote data sources.
>
> The main features of the Silk framework are:
>
> - it supports the generation of owl:sameAs links as well as other 
> types of RDF links.
>
> - it provides a flexible, declarative language for specifying link 
> conditions.
>
> - it can be employed in distributed environments without having to 
> replicate datasets locally.
>
> - it can be used in situations where terms from different vocabularies 
> are mixed and where no consistent RDFS or OWL schemata exist.
>
> - it implements various caching, indexing and entity pre-selection 
> methods to increase performance and reduce network load.
>
> More information about Silk, the Silk-LSL language specification, as 
> well as several examples that demonstrate how Silk is used to set 
> links between different data sources in the LOD cloud is found at:
>
> http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/silk/
>
> The Silk framework is provided under the terms of the BSD license and 
> can be downloaded from
>
> http://code.google.com/p/silk/
>
> Happy linking,
>
> Julius Volz, Christian Bizer
>
Chris,

Nice!

Could be useful re. our Sponger Meta Cartridges which already perform 
lots of lookups across LOD etc.. This is how we mesh data from UMBEL, 
Calais, Zemanta, and New York Time data into the output of our 
RDFization processing pipeline, for instance.

This language could make the Meta Cartridge feature more pluggable and 
amenable to 3rd party Cartridge Developers, especially as we don't want 
to take on the burden of building Cartridges for every potential data 
source type re. Linked Data Web :-)

Links:

1. 
http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/dataspace/dav/wiki/Main/VirtSpongerCartridgeProgrammersGuide 
- Programmer Guide (*draft*)

On a different note, could we please have the Linking Drug Data (LDD) 
effort cross Linked to the Linking Open Data (LOD) effort within ESW 
Wiki. I should be able to locate the LDD RDF archives with ease knowing 
they've been prepared in line with our generally accepted best practices.

-- 


Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	      Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO 
OpenLink Software     Web: http://www.openlinksw.com

Received on Monday, 2 March 2009 17:26:21 UTC