Linking knowledge bases to social media profiles

Social media have become an invaluable source of data for a wide variety of tasks. Unfortunately, this data is hard to gather and process due to low amount of machine readable attributes, API limitations and noisiness. In this paper we propose a system that aligns knowledge base entries of people and organisations to the corresponding social media profiles. The motivation is twofold:(i) on the one hand, we facilitate processing of social media data by allowing the import of rich entity descriptions from knowledge bases;(ii) on the other hand, we are enabling an automatic enrichment of a knowledge base with additional data from the social media. We used this system to create a resource of 893,446 alignments between DBpedia entities and Twitter profiles. This resource allows, effectively, to connect Twitter to the Linked Open Data cloud.