Leveraging Terminological Structure for Object Reconciliation

It has been argued that linked open data is the major benefit of semantic technologies for the web as it provides a huge amount of structured data that can be accessed in a more effective way than web pages. While linked open data avoids many problems connected with the use of expressive ontologies such as the knowledge acquisition bottleneck, data heterogeneity remains a challenging problem. In particular, identical objects may be referred to by different URIs in different data sets. Identifying such representations of the same object is called object reconciliation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to object reconciliation that is based on an existing semantic similarity measure for linked data. We adapt the measure to the object reconciliation problem, present exact and approximate algorithms that efficiently implement the methods, and provide a systematic experimental evaluation based on a benchmark dataset. As our main result, we show that the use of lightweight ontologies and schema information significantly improves object reconciliation in the context of linked open data.