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

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/>
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/> http://code.google.com/p/silk/

 

Happy linking,

 

Julius Volz, Christian Bizer