Silk Link Discovery Framework

As finding a good linking heuristics is usually an iterative process, the Silk Workbench allows the user to quickly evaluate the links which are generated by the current link specification.

After clicking on the Start button, the linking engine starts to generate links in the background. The view is updated whenever new links have been found to show the all generated links. For further examination, a drill-down view can be shown by clicking on a link. The drill-down shows a detailed summary how the individual comparisons and aggregations contribute to the overall fitness of the link, the overall similarity between two links is composed by clicking on a link. This information allows the user to spot parts of the similarity evaluation which did not behave as expected.

Based on its correctness, each link can be associated to one of the following 3 categories:

• Confirms the link as correct. Confirmed links are part of the positive reference link set.
• Contains link whose correctness is not decided i.e. which are not contained in the reference link sets.
• Confirms the link as incorrect. Incorrect links are part of the negative reference link set.

In order to evaluate the correctness of a link specification, the user typically wants to evaluate the correctness of links which are close the similarity threshold. Clicking on the confidence header sorts all links by their confidence which allows to find these links. In addition, a filter can be added, so that only links are shown which contain a specific string.