Entity linking is a fundamental database problem with applicationsin data integration, data cleansing, information retrieval, knowledge fusion, and knowledge-base population. It is the task of accurately identifying multiple, differing, and possibly contradictingrepresentations of the same real-world entity in data. In this work,we propose an entity linking system capable of linking entitiesacross different databases and mentioned-entities extracted fromtext data. Our entity linking solution, called Certus, uses a graph model to represent the profiles of entities. The graph model is versatile, thus, it is capable of handling multiple values for an attributeor a relationship, as well as the provenance descriptions of thevalues. Provenance descriptions of a value provide the settings ofthe value, such as validity periods, sources, security requirements,etc. This paper presents the architecture for the entity linking system, the logical, physical, and indexing models used in the system,and the general linking process. Furthermore, we demonstrate theperformance of update operations of the physical storage modelswhen the system is implemented in two state-of-the-art databasemanagement systems, HBase and Postgres.
@cite_5: Entity Resolution is a core task for merging data collections. Due to its quadratic complexity, it typically scales to large volumes of data through blocking: similar entities are clustered into blocks and pair-wise comparisons are executed only between co-occurring entities, at the cost of some missed matches. There are numerous blocking methods, and the aim of this work is to offer a comprehensive empirical survey, extending the dimensions of comparison beyond what is commonly available in the literature. We consider 17 state-of-the-art blocking methods and use 6 popular real datasets to examine the robustness of their internal configurations and their relative balance between effectiveness and time efficiency. We also investigate their scalability over a corpus of 7 established synthetic datasets that range from 10,000 to 2 million entities.
@cite_6: Record linkage is the process of matching records from several databases that refer to the same entities. When applied on a single database, this process is known as deduplication. Increasingly, matched data are becoming important in many application areas, because they can contain information that is not available otherwise, or that is too costly to acquire. Removing duplicate records in a single database is a crucial step in the data cleaning process, because duplicates can severely influence the outcomes of any subsequent data processing or data mining. With the increasing size of today's databases, the complexity of the matching process becomes one of the major challenges for record linkage and deduplication. In recent years, various indexing techniques have been developed for record linkage and deduplication. They are aimed at reducing the number of record pairs to be compared in the matching process by removing obvious nonmatching pairs, while at the same time maintaining high matching quality. This paper presents a survey of 12 variations of 6 indexing techniques. Their complexity is analyzed, and their performance and scalability is evaluated within an experimental framework using both synthetic and real data sets. No such detailed survey has so far been published.
The efficiency problem has also drawn significant research attention. The complexity of calculating the exact similarity between profiles is @math . Given a large number of entity profiles, say @math million, the time for computing similarity is too long to be practical. Thus, several ideas have been introduced in the literature to address the problem, like canopy (sorting and moving window), hierarchical, bucketing (clustering), and indexing approaches. In practice, the indexing approach has been found to be more useful, resulting in the proposal of a plethora of indexing methods in the literature (see @cite_5 @cite_6 for surveys of techniques).