Silk Link Discovery Framework

Silk is provided in three different variants which address different use cases:

• Silk Single Machine is used to generate RDF links on a single machine. The datasets that should be interlinked can either reside on the same machine or on remote machines which are accessed via the SPARQL protocol. Silk Single Machine provides multithreading and caching. In addition, the performance can be further enhanced using an optional blocking feature.
• Silk MapReduce is used to generate RDF links between data sets using a cluster of multiple machines. Silk MapReduce is based on Hadoop and can for instance be run on Amazon Elastic MapReduce. Silk MapReduce enables Silk to scale out to very big datasets by distributing the link generation to multiple machines.
• Silk Server can be used as an identity resolution component within applications that consume Linked Data from the Web. Silk Server provides an HTTP API for matching instances from an incoming stream of RDF data while keeping track of known entities. It can be used for instance together with a Linked Data crawler to populate a local duplicate-free cache with data from the Web.