Property Alignment of Linked Data Based on Similarity between Functions

Owing to the complex structure and multi-meaning, property alignment is generally regarded as a challenging problem in the context of linked data. In this paper, we propose a novel method to align properties between datasets of linked data. Considering the role of properties in RDF triples, we regard all properties of linked data as property functions, and convert the problem of property alignment to the similarity evaluation between property functions, while the equivalent instances as inputs of property functions. Based on the similarity of property functions, the property alignment process of linked data is introduced. In order to prove the validity, we use the method to align properties in five representative domains between DBpeida and YAGO, DBpedia and LinkedGeoData respectively. The experimental results show that our method is independent of the property naming rules and can retrieve some matching properties ignored by other methods. In addition, our method requires fewer entity co-reference links than the link statistical approach.