Special issue on ontology and linked data matching

Semantic web technologies break down many of the barriers to leveraging the large amount of data and information that has been collected or created. The use of unique identifiers, transport protocols like HTTP, and uniform data description languages like RDF go a considerable way towards providing seamless access to this data. Consequently, the semantic web has grown with the continual creation of new ontologies and linked data covering a wide variety of domains, and applications and analytical techniques using this data have been created. However, while physical data silos have waned, the lack of semantic links between ontologies and linked datasets, supports, in effect, invisible virtual silos preventing these resources from being queried, browsed, or leveraged in a truly uniform way. If such links could be generated in a reliable and scalable way, the network effect would greatly increase the utility of these resources. It is for this reason that the topic of ontology and linked data matching is both important and timely. Ontology and linked data matching has been an active area of research for over a decade now [4],