Entity Resolution (ER) lies at the core of data integration and cleaning and, thus, a bulk of the research examines ways for improving its effectiveness and time efficiency. The initial ER methods primarily target Veracity in the context of structured (relational) data that are described by a schema of well-known quality and meaning. To achieve high effectiveness, they leverage schema, expert, and/or external knowledge. Part of these methods are extended to address Volume, processing large datasets through multi-core or massive parallelization approaches, such as the MapReduce paradigm. However, these early schema-based approaches are inapplicable to Web Data, which abound in voluminous, noisy, semi-structured, and highly heterogeneous information. To address the additional challenge of Variety, recent works on ER adopt a novel, loosely schema-aware functionality that emphasizes scalability and robustness to noise. Another line of present research focuses on the additional challenge of Velocity, aiming to process data collections of a continuously increasing volume. The latest works, though, take advantage of the significant breakthroughs in Deep Learning and Crowdsourcing, incorporating external knowledge to enhance the existing words to a significant extent. This synthesis lecture organizes ER methods into four generations based on the challenges posed by these four Vs. For each generation, we outline the corresponding ER workflow, discuss the state-of-the-art methods per workflow step, and present current research directions. The discussion of these methods takes into account a historical perspective, explaining the evolution of the methods over time along with their similarities and differences. The lecture also discusses the available ER tools and benchmark datasets that allow expert as well as novice users to make use of the available solutions.

In recent years, several knowledge bases have been built to enable large-scale knowledge sharing, but also an entity-centric Web search, mixing both structured data and text querying. These knowledge bases offer machine-readable descriptions of real-world entities, e.g., persons, places, published on the Web as Linked Data. However, due to the different information extraction tools and curation policies employed by knowledge bases, multiple, complementary and sometimes conflicting descriptions of the same real-world entities may be provided. Entity resolution aims to identify different descriptions that refer to the same entity appearing either within or across knowledge bases. The objective of this book is to present the new entity resolution challenges stemming from the openness of the Web of data in describing entities by an unbounded number of knowledge bases, the semantic and structural diversity of the descriptions provided across domains even for the same real-world entities, as well as the autonomy of knowledge bases in terms of adopted processes for creating and curating entity descriptions. The scale, diversity, and graph structuring of entity descriptions in the Web of data essentially challenge how two descriptions can be effectively compared for similarity, but also how resolution algorithms can efficiently avoid examining pairwise all descriptions. The book covers a wide spectrum of entity resolution issues at the Web scale, including basic concepts and data structures, main resolution tasks and workflows, as well as state-of-the-art algorithmic techniques and experimental trade-offs.

In recent years, several knowledge bases have been built to enable large-scale knowledge sharing, but also an entity-centric Web search, mixing both structured data and text querying. These knowledge bases offer machine-readable descriptions of real-world entities, e.g., persons, places, published on the Web as Linked Data. However, due to the different information extraction tools and curation policies employed by knowledge bases, multiple, complementary and sometimes conflicting descriptions of the same real-world entities may be provided. Entity resolution aims to identify different descriptions that refer to the same entity appearing either within or across knowledge bases. The objective of this book is to present the new entity resolution challenges stemming from the openness of the Web of data in describing entities by an unbounded number of knowledge bases, the semantic and structural diversity of the descriptions provided across domains even for the same real-world entities, as well as the autonomy of knowledge bases in terms of adopted processes for creating and curating entity descriptions. The scale, diversity, and graph structuring of entity descriptions in the Web of data essentially challenge how two descriptions can be effectively compared for similarity, but also how resolution algorithms can efficiently avoid examining pairwise all descriptions. The book covers a wide spectrum of entity resolution issues at the Web scale, including basic concepts and data structures, main resolution tasks and workflows, as well as state-of-the-art algorithmic techniques and experimental trade-offs.

Entity resolution is an essential tool in processing and analyzing data in order to draw precise conclusions from the information being presented. Further research in entity resolution is necessary to help promote information quality and improved data reporting in multidisciplinary fields requiring accurate data representation. Innovative Techniques and Applications of Entity Resolution draws upon interdisciplinary research on tools, techniques, and applications of entity resolution. This research work provides a detailed analysis of entity resolution applied to various types of data as well as appropriate techniques and applications and is appropriately designed for students, researchers, information professionals, and system developers.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Applications, WISA 2022, held in Dalian, China, in September 2022. The 45 full papers and 19 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 212 submissions. The papers are grouped in topical sections on knowledge graph, natural language processing, world wide web, machine learning, query processing and algorithm, recommendation, data privacy and security, and blockchain.

The LNCS journal Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems focuses on data management, knowledge discovery, and knowledge processing, which are core and hot topics in computer science. Since the 1990s, the Internet has become the main driving force behind application development in all domains. An increase in the demand for resource sharing across different sites connected through networks has led to an evolution of data- and knowledge-management systems from centralized systems to decentralized systems enabling large-scale distributed applications providing high scalability. Current decentralized systems still focus on data and knowledge as their main resource. Feasibility of these systems relies basically on P2P (peer-to-peer) techniques and the support of agent systems with scaling and decentralized control. Synergy between Grids, P2P systems, and agent technologies is the key to data- and knowledge-centered systems in large-scale environments. This special issue of Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems highlights some of the major challenges emerging from the biomedical applications that are currently inspiring and promoting database research. These include the management, organization, and integration of massive amounts of heterogeneous data; the semantic gap between high-level research questions and low-level data; and privacy and efficiency. The contributions cover a large variety of biological and medical applications, including genome-wide association studies, epidemic research, and neuroscience.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Database Theory, ICDT 2007, held in Barcelona, Spain in January 2007. The 25 revised papers presented together with 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 111 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on information integration and peer to peer, axiomatizations for XML, expressive power of query languages, incompleteness, inconsistency, and uncertainty, XML schemas and typechecking, stream processing and sequential query processing, ranking, XML update and query, as well as query containment.