Interlinking Unstructured and Structured Knowledge in an Integrated Framework

Abstract

Despite the widespread diffusion of structured data sources and the public acclaim of the Linked Open Data initiative, a preponderant amount of information remains nowadays available only in unstructured form, both on the Web and within organizations. While different in form, structured and unstructured contents speak about the very same entities of the world, their properties and relations, still, frameworks for their seamless integration are lacking. In this paper we describe the design of the Knowledge Store, a scalable, fault-tolerant, and Semantic Web grounded storage system for interlinking structured and unstructured data. We discuss its capability to adapt to new types of content and application scenarios, and to provide reasoning and semantic queries services on top of stored contents. We also comment on its envisaged use in the News Reader EU project to manage large amounts of economical-financial data.