Hybrid acquisition of temporal scopes for RDF data

Information on the temporal interval of validity for facts described by RDF triples plays an important role in a large number of applications. Yet, most of the knowledge bases available on the Web of Data do not provide such information in an explicit manner. In this paper, we present a generic approach which addresses this drawback by inserting temporal information into knowledge bases. Our approach combines two types of information to associate RDF triples with time intervals. First, it relies on temporal information gathered from the document Web by an extension of the fact validation framework DeFacto. Second, it harnesses the time information contained in knowledge bases. This knowledge is combined within a three-step approach which comprises the steps matching, selection and merging. We evaluate our approach against a corpus of facts gathered from Yago2 by using DBpedia and Freebase as input and different parameter settings for the underlying algorithms. Our results suggest that we can detect temporal information for facts from DBpedia with an F-measure of up to 70%. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.