TISCO: Temporal scoping of facts

Abstract Some facts in the Web of Data are only valid within a certain time interval. However, most of the knowledge bases available on the Web of Data do not provide temporal information explicitly. Hence, the relationship between facts and time intervals is often lost. A few solutions are proposed in this field. Most of them are concentrated more in extracting facts with time intervals rather than trying to map facts with time intervals. This paper studies the problem of determining the temporal scopes of facts, that is, deciding the time intervals in which the fact is valid. We propose a generic approach which addresses this problem by curating temporal information of facts in the knowledge bases. Our proposed framework, Temporal Information Scoping (TISCO) exploits evidence collected from the Web of Data and the Web. The evidence is combined within a three-step approach which comprises matching, selection and merging. This is the first work employing matching methods that consider both a single fact or a group of facts at a time. We evaluate our approach against a corpus of facts as input and different parameter settings for the underlying algorithms. Our results suggest that we can detect temporal information for facts from DBpedia with an f-measure of up to 80%.