A Machine Learning Approach to Linking FOAF Instances

The friend of a friend (FOAF) vocabulary is widely used on the Web to describe individual people and their properties. Since FOAF does not require a unique ID for a person, it is not clear when two FOAF agents should be linked as co-referent, i.e., denote the same person in the world. One approach is to use the presence of inverse functional properties (e.g., foaf:mbox) as evidence that two individuals are the same. Another applies heuristics based on the string similarity of values of FOAF properties such as name and school as evidence for or against co-reference. Performance is limited, however, by many factors: non-semantic string matching, noise, changes in the world, and the lack of more sophisticated graph analytics. We describe a supervised machine learning approach that uses features defined over pairs of FOAF individuals to produce a classifier for identifying co-referent FOAF instances. We present initial results using data collected from Swoogle and other sources and describe plans for additional analysis.