Entity Identifiers for Lineage Preservation

Abstract. The generation of entity identifiers is a key issue in the context of semantic web technologies. Entity identifiers are needed when we perform any kind of operation (e.g., reference, match, disambiguation) on entities. In this paper, we present a methodology for generating entity identifiers which can be well integrated in the Entity Name System of the OKKAM infrastructure: a system for managing entity identifiers. Our approach is based on a known labelling scheme for directed acyclic graphs. Unlike other related approaches, it allows to keep track of the lineage of an entity over the operations of creation, merge of entities, and split of a single entity. This feature is important in a identifier generation framework because it can allow both local deprecation detection between two entities, as well as the reconstruction of the origin of an entity partially described in different sources (i.e., knowing which entity attributes are coming from which sources).

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ESWS
• Authors: Julien Gaugaz, Gianluca Demartini
• Keywords: Entity Identifiers, Entity Name System, ESWS 2008, Internet Technology, Single Entity