Referring Expression based Identification in Information Systems

身份管理是数据库和信息系统的一个基本组成部分：当实体以及实体之间的关系存储在信息系统中时，必须找到唯一标识这些实体的明确方法。当前的解决方案通常依赖于引入通用标识符（“代理”）或者需要外部的基于值的键，在关系系统中唯一标识对象的属性元组。这两种方法都有许多缺点。前者基本上要求所有已知的单个对象具有唯一的区别标识符。这些标识符通常不足以让人类用户弄清楚他们引用的是什么真实世界的对象，因为它们在语义上是不透明的。一个具体的例子是个人作者或系统必须在社区开发的本体中发明的标识符，例如Freebase（其中警察的“Synchronicity”专辑的标识符是“/guid/9202 a8 c 04000641 f8000000002 f9 e349”）。另一方面，当必须集成来自异构信息系统的数据时，使用外部键会导致问题。 在概念建模中出现了寻找识别属性的其他问题。例如，在扩展的相似性关系建模通过泛化创建新的异构实体集的情况下，通常需要新的辅助和人工标识符来统一地应用于所有实例，尽管所有实体已经被正确地标识。 建议的研究的目标是开发一个全面的理论，用于识别信息系统中的实体的概念的基础上，指的表达。在语言学中，指称表达是任何以对对话者有用的方式标识对象的名词短语。在信息系统中，这些对话者的范围从发出查询的最终用户到与手头的系统通信的其他计算机系统。在这两种情况下，识别对象的通用方式对于此类通信的意义至关重要。 这个建议是围绕着这样一个概念构建的：在一阶逻辑中，指称表达式被表达为一元公式，在适当的上下文中，这些公式适用于话语领域中的单个个体，并以这种方式间接地识别这样一个个体。我们称这样的公式为奇异指称表达式。 该研究将解决许多与信息系统中使用单数指称表达式有关的问题，包括与一般表达能力，计算特性和基于逻辑的指称表达式的限制有关的理论问题，以及设计具有更适合计算特性的一阶逻辑片段，例如，在问答领域，设计开发信息系统的方法，重点是身份管理。

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. Additional problems for finding identifying attributes arise in conceptual modelling. For example, in the case where Extended Entity-Relationship modelling creates a new heterogeneous entity set by generalization, a new auxiliary and an artificial identifier is commonly required to apply uniformly to all instances, despite the fact that all the entities are already properly identified. The goal of the proposed research is to develop a comprehensive theory for identifying entities in information systems based on the notion of a referring expression. In linguistics, a referring expression is any noun phrase identifying an object in a way that will be useful to interlocutors. In information systems, these interlocutors range from end-users issuing queries, to other computer systems communicating with the system at hand. In both cases, a common way of identifying objects is essential for such communication to make sense. The proposal is structured around the notion of referring expressions expressed as unary formulas in first-order logic that, in the appropriate context, are true of a single individual in the universe of discourse and in this way indirectly identify such an individual. We call such formulas singular referring expressions. The research will address many issues relating to the use of the singular referring expressions in information systems ranging from theoretical issues related to general expressive power, computational properties, and on the limits of logic-based referring expressions, to designing fragments of first-order logic with more amenable computational properties, e.g., in the area of query answering, to design methodologies for developing information systems with focus on identity management.