Wombat - A Generalization Approach for Automatic Link Discovery

A significant portion of the evolution of Linked Data datasets lies in updating the links to other datasets. An important challenge when aiming to update these links automatically under the open-world assumption is the fact that usually only positive examples for the links exist. We address this challenge by presenting and evaluating WOMBAT, a novel approach for the discovery of links between knowledge bases that relies exclusively on positive examples. WOMBAT is based on generalisation via an upward refinement operator to traverse the space of link specification. We study the theoretical characteristics of WOMBAT and evaluate it on 8 different benchmark datasets. Our evaluation suggests that WOMBAT outperforms state-of-the-art supervised approaches while relying on less information. Moreover, our evaluation suggests that WOMBAT’s pruning algorithm allows it to scale well even on large datasets.