Referring Expression based Identification in Information Systems

身份管理是数据库和信息系统的一个重要组成部分：当实体以及实体之间的关系存储在信息系统中时，必须找到一种明确的方式来唯一地识别这些实体。当前的解决方案通常依赖于在基于对象的方法中引入通用标识符(“代理”)，或者需要外部的基于值的键，即唯一标识关系系统中的对象的属性元组。这两种方法都有许多缺点。前者本质上要求所有已知的单个对象都具有唯一的区分标识符。这些标识符通常不足以让人类用户找出他们所指的真实世界对象，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论中发明的识别符，例如Freebase(其中由警方制作的“Synchronity”专辑的识别符是“/GUID/9202a8c04000641f8000000002f9e349”)。另一方面，当必须集成来自不同信息系统的数据时，使用外部键会导致问题。

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.