Situation and Identity

Danny Ayers' blog points to a paper which is about ontology driven architectures, and which includes the link below the title here. In fact, that paper links to several papers appropriate to this blog. I see parallels between the Situation and Identity paper and the topic maps Reference Model that Bernard pointed to in the previous post.

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.

That, to me, sounds like conferred identity, using terms from the RM. It also reminds me of the seeing as post I did here much earlier. I'm not making any value judgements on the content of the paper; rather, I think it to be grist for a lot of group think.