Abstract The Linked Data paradigm has evolved into a powerful enabler for the transition from the documentoriented Web into the Semantic Web. While the amount of data published as Linked Data grows steadily and has surpassed 25 billion triples, less than 5% of these triples are links between knowledge bases. Link discovery frameworks provide the functionality necessary to discover missing links between knowledge bases. Yet, this task requires a signi?cant amount of time, especially when it is carried out on large data sets. This paper presents and evaluates LIMES, a novel time-ef?cient approach for link discovery in metric spaces. Our approach utilizes the mathematical characteristics of metric spaces during the mapping process to ?lter out a large number of those instance pairs that do not suf?ce the mapping conditions. We present the mathematical foundation and the core algorithms employed in LIMES. We evaluate our algorithms with synthetic data to elucidate their behavior on small and large data sets with different con?gurations and compare the runtime of LIMES with another state-of-the-art link discovery tool.