Making Sense of Ambiguity

Resource Identity and Semantic Extensions: Making Sense of Ambiguity

Paper presented by David Booth at Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco, 25 June 2010. Just do read it and try to make sense of it. The best analysis of the issue I've read so far.

Coreference using substitution rules

Note : This is mostly copied/adapted from a message I posted last week in yet another conversation about the identity issue on W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group internal mailing list.

Coreference as a Service

Yahoo! releases Concordance as part of GeoPlanet API. The aim of this service is to provide equivalence between identifiers for geo entities defined in different namespaces. Quoting Gary Gale on Yahoo! Geo Technologies Blog.

We’ve collected these identifiers and namespaces as a single object, a concordance, which empowers a user to reference each source. You can think of it as a mapping of an identifier in a namespace to its equivalent in another namespace. But it’s not a joining of information; we’re only enumerating the identifiers, not the back-end data or attributes that they describe.

The last sentence is important. The service is agnostic on the data model or ontologies used by the various identifiers publishers. Ontological emptiness makes the service useful.

Another striking example is provided by Ellerdale, reconciliating Wikipedia or Freebase topics with Twitter hashtags to build amazing dynamic pages.

Let's guess that many more of the same will emerge in the months to come.