Towards a benchmark for instance matching

In the general field of knowledge interoperability and ontology matching, instance matching is a crucial task for several applications, from identity recognition to data integration. The aim of instance matching is to detect instances referred to the same real-world object despite the differences among their descriptions. Algorithms and techniques for instance matching have been proposed in literature, however the problem of their evaluation is still open. Furthermore, a widely recognized problem in the Semantic Web in general is the lack of evaluation data. While OAEI (Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative) has provided a reference benchmark for concept matching, evaluation data for instance matching are still few. In this paper, we provide a benchmark for instance matching, with the goal of taking into account the main requirements that instance matching algorithms should address.