Entity Resolution (ER) is a fundamental task of data integration: it identifies different representations (i.e., profiles) of the same real-world entity in databases. To compare all possible profile pairs through an ER algorithm has a quadratic complexity. Blocking is commonly employed to avoid that: profiles are grouped into blocks according to some features, and ER is performed only for entities of the same block. Yet, devising blocking criteria and ER algorithms for data with highly schema heterogeneity is a difficult and error-prone task calling for automatic methods and debugging tools. In our previous work, we presented Blast, an ER system that can scale practitioners' favorite Entity Resolution algorithms. In current version, Blast has been devised to take full advantage of parallel and distributed computation as well (running on top of Apache Spark). It implements the state-of-the-art unsupervised blocking method based on automatically extracted loose schema information. We build on top of blast a GUI (Graphic User Interface), which allows: (i) to visualize, understand, and (optionally) manually modify the loose schema information automatically extracted (i.e., injecting user's knowledge in the system); (ii) to retrieve resolved entities through a free-text search box, and to visualize the process that lead to that result (i.e., the provenance). Experimental results on real-world datasets show that these two functionalities can significantly enhance Entity Resolution results.

Many of the challenges that have to be faced in Industry 4.0 involve the management and analysis of huge amount of data (e.g. sensor data management and machine-fault prediction in industrial manufacturing, web-logs analysis in e-commerce). To handle the so-called Big Data management and analysis, a plethora of frameworks has been proposed in the last decade. Many of them are focusing on the parallel processing paradigm, such as MapReduce, Apache Hive, Apache Flink. However, in this jungle of frameworks, the performance evaluation of these technologies is not a trivial task, and strictly depends on the application requirements. The scope of this paper is to compare two of the most employed and promising frameworks to manage big data: Apache Flink and Apache Hive, which are general purpose distributed platforms under the umbrella of the Apache Software Foundation. To evaluate these two frameworks we use the benchmark BigBench, developed for Apache Hive. We re-implemented the most significant queries of Apache Hive BigBench to make them work on Apache Flink, in order to be able to compare the results of the same queries executed on both frameworks. Our results show that Apache Flink, if it is configured well, is able to outperform Apache Hive

The Open Data philosophy is based on the idea that certain data should be made available to all citizens, in an open form, without any copyright restrictions, patents or other mechanisms of control. Various government have started to publish open data, first of all USA and UK in 2009, and in 2015, the Open Data Barometer project (www.opendatabarometer.org) states that on 77 diverse states across the world, over 55 percent have developed some form of Open Government Data initiative. We claim Public Administrations, that are the main producers and one of the consumers of Open Data, might effectively extract important information by integrating its own data with open data sources. This paper reports the activities carried on during a one-year research project on Open Data for Youth Policies. The project was mainly devoted to explore the youth situation in the municipalities and provinces of the Emilia Romagna region (Italy), in particular, to examine data on population, education and work. The project goals were: to identify interesting data sources both from the open data community and from the private repositories of local governments of Emilia Romagna region related to the Youth Policies; to integrate them and, to show up the result of the integration by means of a useful navigator tool; in the end, to publish new information on the web as Linked Open Data. This paper also reports the main issues encountered that may seriously affect the entire process of consumption, integration till the publication of open data.