An empirical study on the evaluation of interlinking tools on the Web of Data

The rise and widespread use of Linked Data has encouraged data providers to publish and link their content in order to classify and organize information in a useful fashion. Interlinking between datasets enhances data navigation and facilitates searching. As a result, the use of interlinking tools as a way of connecting data items to the Linked Open Data cloud has become more prevalent. In this paper, we examine the results obtained by three interlinking tools used to link a large educational collection to the Linked Open Data datasets. The generated output by the interlinking tools, which was later assessed by human experts, illustrates that data publishers can rely on current interlinking approaches and thus adopt them to connect their resources to the Web of Data. Our findings also provide evidence that two of these tools, namely Silk and LIMES, can be considered as the most promising.