Incremental Blocking for Entity Resolution over Web Streaming Data

The widespread use of information systems has become a valuable source of semi-structured data. In this context, Entity Resolution (ER) emerges as a fundamental task to integrate multiple knowledge bases or identify similarities between data items (i.e., entities). Since ER is an inherently quadratic task, blocking techniques are often used to improve efficiency. Beyond the challenges related to the data volume and heterogeneity, blocking techniques also face two other challenges: streaming data and incremental processing. To address these challenges, we propose PRIME, a novel incremental schema-agnostic blocking technique that utilizes parallelism to enhance blocking efficiency. The proposed technique deals with streaming and incremental data using a distributed computational infrastructure. To improve efficiency, the technique avoids unnecessary comparisons and applies a time window strategy to prevent excessive memory consumption.