Large knowledge bases typically contain data adhering to various schemas with incomplete and or noisy type information. This seriously complicates further integration and post-processing efforts, as type information is crucial in correctly handling the data. In this paper, we introduce a novel statistical type inference method, called StaTIX, to effectively infer instance types in Linked Data sets in a fully unsupervised manner. Our inference technique leverages a new hierarchical clustering algorithm that is robust, highly effective, and scalable. We introduce a novel approach to reduce the processing complexity of the similarity matrix specifying the relations between various instances in the knowledge base. This approach speeds up the inference process while also improving the correctness of the inferred types due to the noise attenuation in the input data. We further optimize the clustering process by introducing a dedicated hash function that speeds up the inference process by orders of magnitude without negatively affecting its accuracy. Finally, we describe a new technique to identify representative clusters from the multi-scale output of our clustering algorithm to further improve the accuracy of the inferred types. We empirically evaluate our approach on several real-world datasets and compare it to the state of the art. Our results show that StaTIX is more efficient than existing methods (both in terms of speed and memory consumption) as well as more effective. StaTIX reduces the F1-score error of the predicted types by about 40 on average compared to the state of the art and improves the execution time by orders of magnitude.
@cite_5: We study the problem of distributed RDFS reasoning and query answering on top of distributed hash tables. Scalable, distributed RDFS reasoning is an essential functionality for providing the scalability and performance that large-scale Semantic Web applications require. Our goal in this paper is to compare and evaluate two well-known approaches to RDFS reasoning, namely backward and forward chaining, on top of distributed hash tables. We show how to implement both algorithms on top of the distributed hash table Bamboo and prove their correctness. We also study the time-space trade-off exhibited by the algorithms analytically, and experimentally by evaluating our algorithms on PlanetLab.
@cite_4: Type information is very valuable in knowledge bases. However, most large open knowledge bases are incomplete with respect to type information, and, at the same time, contain noisy and incorrect data. That makes classic type inference by reasoning difficult. In this paper, we propose the heuristic link-based type inference mechanism SDType, which can handle noisy and incorrect data. Instead of leveraging T-box information from the schema, SDType takes the actual use of a schema into account and thus is also robust to misused schema elements.
@cite_23: Based on URIs, HTTP and RDF, the Linked Data project [3] aims to expose, share and connect related data from diverse sources on the SemanticWeb. Linked Open Data (LOD) is a community effort to apply the Linked Data principles to data published under open licenses. With this effort, a large number of LOD datasets have been gathered in the LOD cloud, such as DBpedia, Freebase and FOAF profiles. These datasets are connected by links such as owl:sameAs. LOD has gained rapidly progressed and is still growing constantly. Until May 2009, there are 4.7 billion RDF triples and around 142 million RDF links [3]. After that, the total has been increased to 16 billion triples in March 2010 and another 14 billion triples have been published by the AIFB according to [17].
@cite_6: We prove that entailment for RDF Schema (RDFS) is decidable, NP-complete, and in P if the target graph does not contain blank nodes. We show that the standard set of entailment rules for RDFS is incomplete and that this can be corrected by allowing blank nodes in predicate position. We define semantic extensions of RDFS that involve datatypes and a subset of the OWL vocabulary that includes the property-related vocabulary (e.g. FunctionalProperty), the comparisons (e.g. sameAs and differentFrom) and the value restrictions (e.g. allValuesFrom). These semantic extensions are in line with the 'if-semantics' of RDFS and weaker than the 'iff-semantics' of D-entailment and OWL (DL or Full). For these semantic extensions we present entailment rules, prove completeness results, prove that consistency is in P and that, just as for RDFS, entailment is NP-complete, and in P if the target graph does not contain blank nodes. There are no restrictions on use to obtain decidability: classes can be used as instances.
The classical way to perform type inference is the application of logical reasoning, e.g., via RDFS OWL entailment regimes @cite_5 @cite_6 . The resulting accuracy is highly dependent on the cleanliness and correctness of the statements in the knowledge base, though a number of works have attempted to reason on noisy semantic data @cite_23 . Reasoning-based techniques are generally speaking considered as not suitable for cases where the knowledge base contains erroneous or conflicting statements @cite_4 . In addition, logical reasoning only allows to infer information from the facts that are present in the dataset; it is unsuited to infer types when most of the values are missing.