DSNotify: handling broken links in the web of data

• Authors: Niko P. Popitsch;Bernhard Haslhofer
• Venue: Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web
• Year: 2010

The Web of Data has emerged as a way of exposing structured linked data on the Web. It builds on the central building blocks of the Web (URIs, HTTP) and benefits from its simplicity and wide-spread adoption. It does, however, also inherit the unresolved issues such as the broken link problem. Broken links constitute a major challenge for actors consuming Linked Data as they require them to deal with reduced accessibility of data. We believe that the broken link problem is a major threat to the whole Web of Data idea and that both Linked Data consumers and providers will require solutions that deal with this problem. Since no general solutions for fixing such links in the Web of Data have emerged, we make three contributions into this direction: first, we provide a concise definition of the broken link problem and a comprehensive analysis of existing approaches. Second, we present DSNotify, a generic framework able to assist human and machine actors in fixing broken links. It uses heuristic feature comparison and employs a time-interval-based blocking technique for the underlying instance matching problem. Third, we derived benchmark datasets from knowledge bases such as DBpedia and evaluated the effectiveness of our approach with respect to the broken link problem. Our results show the feasibility of a time-interval-based blocking approach for systems that aim at detecting and fixing broken links in the Web of Data.