Referring Expression based Identification in Information Systems

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Management of identity is an essential component of database and information systems: when entities, and relationships between entities, are stored in an information system, a clear way of uniquely identifying such entities must be found. Current solutions typically rely on introducing universal identifiers ("surrogates") in object-based approaches or require external value-based keys, tuples of attributes that uniquely identify objects in relational systems. Both these approaches suffer from numerous shortcomings. The former essentially requires all known individual objects to have unique distinguishing identifiers. These identifiers are often insufficient to allow human users to figure out what real-world object they refer to, since they are semantically opaque. A specific example are identifiers that individual authors or the system must invent in community-developed ontologies such as Freebase (where the identifier of the "Synchronicity" album by the Police is "/guid/9202a8c04000641f8000000002f9e349"). On the other hand, using external keys leads to problems when data from heterogeneous information systems must be integrated.