Enforcing Relational Matching Dependencies with Datalog for Entity Resolution
This work addresses entity resolution for database management by providing a more expressive declarative framework, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing matching dependencies and answer set programs.
The paper tackled the problem of entity resolution by extending matching dependencies to relational matching dependencies to capture more application semantics, and identified classes for which the general answer set program can be automatically rewritten into a stratified Datalog program, resulting in a single clean instance as its standard model.
Entity resolution (ER) is about identifying and merging records in a database that represent the same real-world entity. Matching dependencies (MDs) have been introduced and investigated as declarative rules that specify ER policies. An ER process induced by MDs over a dirty instance leads to multiple clean instances, in general. General "answer sets programs" have been proposed to specify the MD-based cleaning task and its results. In this work, we extend MDs to "relational MDs", which capture more application semantics, and identify classes of relational MDs for which the general ASP can be automatically rewritten into a stratified Datalog program, with the single clean instance as its standard model.