A Framework for Identity Resolution and Merging for Multi-source Information Extraction

In the context of ontology-based information extraction, identity resolution is the process of deciding whether an instance extracted from text refers to a known entity in the target domain (e. g. the ontology). We present an ontology-based framework for identity resolution which can be customised to different application domains and extraction tasks. Rules for identify resolution, which compute similarities between target and source entities based on class information and instance properties and values, can be defined for each class in the ontology. We present a case study of the application of the framework to the problem of multi-source job vacancy extraction.