LANCE: Piercing to the Heart of Instance Matching Tools

One of the main challenges in the Data Web is the identification of instances that refer to the same real-world entity. Choosing the right framework for this purpose remains tedious, as current instance matching benchmarks fail to provide end users and developers with the necessary insights pertaining to how current frameworks behave when dealing with real data. In this paper, we present Lance, a domain-independent instance matching benchmark generator which focuses on benchmarking instance matching systems for Linked Data. Lance is the first Linked Data benchmark generator to support complex semantics-aware test cases that take into account expressive OWL constructs, in addition to the standard test cases related to structure and value transformations. Lance supports the definition of matching tasks with varying degrees of difficulty and produces a weighted gold standard, which allows a more fine-grained analysis of the performance of instance matching tools. It can accept any linked dataset and its accompanying schema as input to produce a target dataset implementing test cases of varying levels of difficulty. We provide a comparative analysis with Lance benchmarks to assess and identify the capabilities of state of the art instance matching systems as well as an evaluation to demonstrate the scalability of Lance’s test case generator.