Introduction

Silk Workbench is a web application which guides the user through the process of creating a link specification for interlinking two data sources.

The Silk Workbench provides the following components:

• Workspace Browser Enables the user to browse the projects in the workspace.
  Linking Tasks can be loaded from a project and comitted back to it later.

• Link Specification Editor A graphical editor which enables the user to easily create and edit link specifications. The widget will show the current link
  specification in a tree view while allowing editing using drag-and-drop.

• Evaluation Allows the user to execute the current Link Specification. The links are displayed while they are generated on-the-fly. Generated links
  for which the reference link set does not specify their correctness, the user may confirm or decline their correctness. The user may request detailed summaries on how the similarity score of specific links is composed of.

The typical workflow of creating a new Link Specification consists of:

1. The user opens an existing Linking Task from the Workspace or creates a new Linking Task.
2. The user uses the Link Specification Editor to refine the current Link Specication.
3. The output of the Link Specification is evaluated based on the reference links using the Evaluation.
4. If all links are correct, the user commits the Link Specification to the Workspace. If some links are wrong the user proceeds with the next step.
5. The user confirms or declines the correctness of a number of links

Installation and Usage

There are two ways to run the Silk Workbench. It can either been run on the command-line or deployed in a servlet container such as Jetty.

Running the Silk Workbench from the Command Line

In order to run the Silk Workbench from the command line, you need:

1. Silk Link Discovery Framework: Get the most recent version.
2. Java Runtime Environment: The Silk Link Discovery Framework runs on top of the JVM. Get the most recent JRE.

What to do:

1. Run the Silk Workbench:
   

   java -jar workbench.war

2. Navigate to http://localhost:8080

Deploying the Silk Workbench on a Servlet Container

The Silk web archive included in the release can easily be deployed on a servlet container. In order to deploy the Silk Workbench on Jetty 6 you need to:

1. Copy workbench.war to the webapps directory of you Jetty installation
2. As the default memory settings of Jetty might not be sufficient, increase the maximum heap space.
3. Navigate to the Silk Workbench. By default it is deployed in http://localhost:8080/silk/