An Observational Study of Equivalence Links in Cultural Heritage Linked Data for agents

Nuno Freire, Hugo Manguinhas, Antoine Isaac

Abstract: This article presents an observational study of the virtual graph formed by equivalence links between agent entities across 8 knowledge bases. To evaluate the potential of this linked data graph, we measured the equivalences that it could provide for a real dataset. We crawled the virtual graph by starting from references to agents we found in descriptions of objects collected from data of cultural heritage institutions in Europeana. Our study characterizes the current virtual equivalence graph, presenting statistics about the links, their type and origin. Crawling the equivalences for agent URIs required several crawling iterations on the virtual equivalence graph. The amount of gathered equivalences grows steeply in the first 3 crawling iterations and stabilizes on the 4th iteration. VIAF was the KB with the highest number of equivalences, reaching 60.7%, and it was followed by Wikidata with 34.5%.