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SameAs Retrieval Service

Master Thesis

When working with knowledge graphs, several IRIs can point to the same real-world entity. While it is a simple insight, it still creates a lot of challenges in today's semantic web based applications. A solution can be to gather owl:sameAs links to identify IRIs that point to the same real-world entity, e.g., as GERBIL does it (see "URI set retrieval" in 4.2.2). However, this can lead to a lot of work that has to be done locally by a single machine. What we propose instead is to develop a web service that takes a given IRI and provides a set of IRIs that point all to the same real-world entity as the given IRI.

There has been works before that went into a similar direction. SameAs.cc was an effort to provide such a service. However, it comes with several drawbacks:

  1. It provides sets of IRIs from which it is known that they are faulty (i.e., IRIs with different meanings are within the same set).
  2. It relies on data from 2018.
  3. It does not provide provenance for the provided set.

The goal of this thesis is to target all these drawbacks and provide a service that can be used by other knowledge-graph-based applications, easily.