Truth Discovery to Resolve Object Conflicts in Linked Data

In the community of Linked Data, anyone can publish their data as Linked Data on the web because of the openness of the Semantic Web. As such, RDF (Resource Description Framework) triples described the same real-world entity can be obtained from multiple sources; it inevitably results in conflicting objects for a certain predicate of a real-world entity. The objective of this study is to identify one truth from multiple conflicting objects for a certain predicate of a real-world entity. An intuitive principle based on common sense is that an object from a reliable source is trustworthy; thus, a source that provide trustworthy object is reliable. Many truth discovery methods based on this principle have been proposed to estimate source reliability and identify the truth. However, the effectiveness of existing truth discovery methods is significantly affected by the number of objects provided by each source. Therefore, these methods cannot be trivially extended to resolve conflicts in Linked Data with a scale-free property, i.e., most of the sources provide few conflicting objects, whereas only a few sources have many conflicting objects. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach called TruthDiscover to identify the truth in Linked Data with a scale-free property. Two strategies are adopted in TruthDiscover to reduce the effect of the scalefree property on truth discovery. First, this approach leverages the topological properties of the Source Belief Graph to estimate the priori beliefs of sources, which are utilized to smooth the trustworthiness of sources. Second, this approach utilizes the Hidden Markov Random Field to model the interdependencies between objects to estimate the trust values of objects accurately. Experiments are conducted in the four datasets, which include people, locations, organizations, and descriptors, to evaluate TruthDiscover. Experimental results show that TruthDiscover outperforms TruthFinder, F-Quality Assessment and Voting in terms of accuracy when confronted with data having a scale-free property.