Composition du jury:

To my mom Zina and my dad Kostas for their unconditional love and support... In the recent years, the Web of Data has increased significantly, containing a huge number of RDF triples. Integrating data described in different RDF datasets and creating semantic links among them, has become one of the most important goals of RDF applications. These links express semantic correspondences between ontology entities or data. Among the different kinds of semantic links that can be established, identity links express that different resources refer to the same real world entity. By comparing the number of resources published on the Web with the number of identity links, one can observe that the goal of building a Web of data is still not accomplished. Several data linking approaches infer identity links using keys. Nevertheless, in most datasets published on the Web, the keys are not available and it can be difficult, even for an expert, to declare them. The aim of this thesis is to study the problem of automatic key discovery in RDF data and to propose new efficient approaches to tackle this problem. Data published on the We