On Jul 25, 2013, at 10:38 AM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
What in the SW allows me to know, enables me to learn that the labels "M0760" and "MENSA-FL" mean the same thing?
Yes, via an owl:sameAs relation that associates relationship (triple) participants with the labels "M0760" and "MENSA-FL" .
Here is an example that leverages Linked Data i.e., the use of HTTP URIs to denote the relationship participants such that a human or machine has access to description oriented data that extends from relationship participants all the way to the actual relation semantics:
## Turtle ##
## Co-Reference example ##
<#Thing1>
a <#Entity> ;
<#Thing1> <#label> "M0760" .
<#Thing2>
a <#Entity> ;
<#Thing1> <#label> "MENSA-FL" .
To my eye, you are stating a semantic equivalence... who or what does the discovery?
I apologize for being unclear. Too much ambiguity in the air.
It is one thing to have a mechanism that STATEs equivalence or similarity across thingies that is obviously easily solved in a variety of ways. A spreadsheet would suffice & likely be far more familiar to most folks.
The challenge is how do I LEARN or DISCOVER that thingies are same/similar/related. How does SW do semantic DISCOVERY?
Currently that sort of esoteric information is typically walking around in the heads of SMEs who can be very difficult to pin down.
The situation is that I'm new to "the system" (a highly ambiguous & imprecise description since I really do not know enough to understand if I'm dealing with A system or a dozen systems) & need to achieve some sort of interoperability of various pieces of data. I want to pull data out of A, B, & G & merge it into X. Very typical activity.
Assuming I am working in a typical 20-30-40+ year old (software/documentation) collection, can I just point owl:sameAs functionality at 50M LoC (lines of code in several dozen languages) & it will tell me, or ask me to consider that M0760 & MENSA-FL are potentially the same? I'm guessing SW is silent on this challenge.