Linked data endpoints are online query gateways to semantically annotated linked data sources. In order to query these data sources, SPARQL query language is used as a standard. Although a linked data endpoint (i.e. SPARQL endpoint) is a basic Web service, it provides a platform for federated online querying and data linking methods. For linked data consumers, SPARQL endpoint availability and discovery are crucial for live querying and semantic information retrieval. Current studies show that availability of linked datasets is very low, while the locations of linked data endpoints change frequently. There are linked data respsitories that collect and list the available linked data endpoints or resources. It is observed that around half of the endpoints listed in existing repositories are not accessible (temporarily or permanently offline). These endpoint URLs are shared through repository websites, such as Datahub.io, however, they are weakly maintained and revised only by their publishers. In this study, a novel metacrawling method is proposed for discovering and monitoring linked data sources on the Web. We implemented the method in a prototype system, named SPARQL Endpoints Discovery (SpEnD). SpEnD starts with a “search keyword” discovery process for finding relevant keywords for the linked data domain and specifically SPARQL endpoints. Then, the collected search keywords are utilized to find linked data sources via popular search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex). By using this method, most of the currently listed SPARQL endpoints in existing endpoint repositories, as well as a significant number of new SPARQL endpoints, have been discovered. We analyze our findings in comparison to Datahub collection in detail.

Linked data sets are created using semantic Web technologies and they are usually big and the number of such datasets is growing. The query execution is therefore costly, and knowing the content of data in such datasets should help in targeted querying. Our aim in this paper is to classify linked data sets by their knowledge content. Earlier projects such as LOD Cloud, LODStats, and SPARQLES analyze linked data sources in terms of content, availability and infrastructure. In these projects, linked data sets are classified and tagged principally using VoID vocabulary and analyzed according to their content, availability and infrastructure. Although all linked data sources listed in these projects appear to be classified or tagged, there are a limited number of studies on automated tagging and classification of newly arriving linked data sets. Here, we focus on automated classification of linked data sets using semantic scoring methods. We have collected the SPARQL endpoints of 1,328 unique linked datasets from Datahub, LOD Cloud, LODStats, SPARQLES, and SpEnD projects. We have then queried textual descriptions of resources in these data sets using their rdfs:comment and rdfs:label property values. We analyzed these texts in a similar manner with document analysis techniques by assuming every SPARQL endpoint as a separate document. In this regard, we have used WordNet semantic relations library combined with an adapted term frequency-inverted document frequency (tfidf) analysis on the words and their semantic neighbours. In WordNet database, we have extracted information about comment/label objects in linked data sources by using hypernym, hyponym, homonym, meronym, region, topic and usage semantic relations. We obtained some significant results on hypernym and topic semantic relations; we can find words that identify data sets and this can be used in automatic classification and tagging of linked data sources. By using these words, we experimented different classifiers with different scoring methods, which results in better classification accuracy results.