owl:sameAs and Linked Data: An Empirical Study | CSEE Online Publication Manager

Linked Data is a steadily growing presence on the Web. In Linked Data, the description of resources can be obtained incrementally by dereferencing the URIs of resources via the HTTP protocol. The use of owl:sameAs further enriches the Linked Data space by declaratively supporting distributed semantic data integration at the instance level. When consuming Linked Data, users should be careful when handling owl:sameAs: in that URIs linked by owl:sameAs may not be appropriate for simple aggregation, and that recursively exploring owl:sameAs may lead to considerable network overhead. In this work, we discuss and conduct an empirical pilot study on the usage of owl:sameAs in the Linked Data community. The results include initial quantitative measures of the usage of owl:sameAs. Based on observations of these results, we further discuss several strategies for dealing with owl:sameAs in Linked Data applications.