Situation and Identity

Another paper mined from already quoted page about Semantic Web Software Engineering Task Force. Under the general title comes a very technical subtitle
"A Generalisation of Inverse Functional Properties" which does not speak much to people not aware of arcane details of OWL terminology. "Inverse Functional Properties" should be better named "Identifying Properties", since, according to OWL semantics, two individuals sharing the same value for such a property must be considered as the same one. The abstract says:

This paper examines the notions of situation and identity on the semantic web. The authors define how identity and situation apply to the semantic web, and present methods for using Inverse Functional Properties to utilise these definitions. We present the notion of a Composite Inverse Functional Property in order to exploit the structure of data for identification, and show how these can be used to apply context specific identification.

Context specific identification is really the concept to highlight here.