X-Link

Overview

X-Link is a fully configurable Named Entity Extraction (NEE) tool which allows the user/developer to easily define the categories of entities that are interesting for the application at hand by exploiting one or more (online) Semantic Knowledge Bases. The user is also able to update a category and specify how to semantically link and enrich the identified entities. This enhanced configurability allows X-Link to be lightly configured for different contexts, for building domain-specific applications (e.g. for identifying drugs in a medical search system, for annotating and exploring fish species in a marine-related web page, etc.).

Key features

Currently X-Link supports the analysis of plain text files, HTML pages, Microsoft Word and Powerpoint files (.doc, .docx, .ppt and .pptx), PDF files, and XML-based files (e.g. XML and RDF files). At first it reads the contents of the corresponding document and performs a "cleaning" task, i.e. it removes useless text (e.g. HTML tags in a Web page or Meta elements in a Microsoft Word file). Then, it applies NEE in the cleaned contents of the document.

X-Link starts by reading an initial configuration which is stored in a properties file. It also implements functions that allow the user/developer to configure the system, e.g. through an administrator API. Specifically, the following functions are currently supported:

• Add a new category, using one or more lists of entities, one or more instances resource classes or one or more instances SPARQL queries.
• Update an existing category, using one or more lists of entities, one or more instances resource classes or one or more instances SPARQL queries. The user can either totally replace a category (i.e. remove the old entities and add the new ones) or just add the new entities.
• Remove an existing category.
• Change the dispayed name of an existing category (i.e rename).
• Set/change the underlying Knowledge Bases
• Set/change how to query the underlying Knowledge Bases for linking the identified entities.
• Set/change how to query the underlying Knowledge Bases for enriching the identified entities.
• Set/change the active categories, i.e. the categories for which X-Link identified entities.