OKKAM: Enabling a Web of Entities

Already in the early 14th century, the philosopher William of Ockham created the philosophical principle known as Ockham’s Razor, which can be translated from Latin as ”entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity”. Today, one of the big - and yet unresolved - issues in integrating information distributed over a network of accessible data is the uncontrolled ”multiplication” of identifiers which are used to refer to the same entity (e.g. a person, an event, an organization, a location, a product) across multiple heterogeneous sources. In this paper we propose a system called OKKAM that is currently under development to tackle this “Identity Crisis” on the Semantic Web; we discuss requirements, architecture, usage scenarios and services and experiments we have developed so far.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: I3
• Authors: Paolo Bouquet, Heiko Stoermer, Daniel Giacomuzzi
• Keywords: Early 14th Century, I3 2007, Internet Technology, Ockham’s Razor, Philosopher William