A Conceptual Model for a Web-Scale Entity Name System

Abstract

Abstract. The problem of identity and reference is receiving increasing attention in the (semantic) web community and is emerging as one of the key features which distinguish traditional knowledge representation from knowledge representation on the web with respect to data interlinking and knowledge integration on a large scale. As part of this debate, the OKKAM project proposed the creation of an Entity Name System which provides rigid identifiers, named OKKAMids, for any type of concrete and particular entities, and links OKKAMids to existing identifiers which have been created elsewhere for the same entity. The introduction of these identifiers raises some practical and conceptual concerns. In this paper we address them by extending two proposed ontologies (IRE and IRW) to accomodate the notion of OKKAMid, describe their formal properties, illustrate why they may play an important role in the construction of the Semantic Web and discuss how they can be integrated with other approaches for mapping URIs onto each others.

From Web Data to Entities and Back

“…Thus, together with the OKKAM-empowered tools it can contribute to realize entity oriented information systems. The conceptual model for reusing OKKAM identifiers on the Web is discussed in [5]. The paper [7] presents and early prototype of the ENS, the system and the corresponding ecosystem we are presenting in this paper has significantly improved since these early versions.…”

The Entity Name System: Enabling the web of entities

“…Among them are identifiers for geographic entities (e.g. in the Geonames ontology 4 ), for encyclopedic entities (in the DBPedia system 5 or the Yago ontology 6 ) or even Genes (in the Uniprot Gene Ontology 7 ). The current practice is to use RDF URIs for several different goals: (i) redirecting to a set of assertions about a non-web resource; (ii) linking from one set of assertions to another; (iii) providing a surrogate/substitute/proxy for non-web resources.…”

“…We note the following important distinction between the RDF URI identifiers, and the identifiers produced and used by the ENS (for a more detailed, theoretical discussion refer to [5]): the ENS identifiers are rigid designators 8 for any kind of concrete and particular entity. In simplified terms, the above statement says that while the interpretation of an RDF URI is a set of RDF triples (about an entity), the interpretation of an ENS identifier is the entity itself.…”

“…(We include a rigorous discussion and definition in our previous work [5].) Our notion of entity is quite liberal, and includes things like products, organizations, associations, countries, events, publications, hotels, people, etc.…”

“…Along with the problem of assigning global identifiers to entities also come the problems of managing these identifiers throughout the entire lifetime of the entities. Giving efficient solutions to the above issues is the goal of our Entity Name System (ENS) [7], [3], [5]. The ENS aims to improve the linkage of data about individual entities in the World Wide Web (WWW), by handling the process of assigning and managing identifiers for entities.…”