Entity-Centric Semantic Interoperability

This chapter argues that the notion of identity of and reference to entities (objects, individuals, instances) is fundamental in order to achieve semantic interoperability and integration between different sources of knowledge. The first step in order to integrate different information sources about an entity is to recognize that those sources describe the same entity. Unfortunately, different systems that manage information about entities commonly issue different identifiers for these entities. This makes reference to entities across information systems very complicated or impossible, because there are no means to know how an entity is identified in another system. The authors propose a global, public infrastructure, the Entity Name System (ENS), which enables the creation and re-use of identifiers for entities. This a-priori approach enables systems to reference entities with a globally unique identifier, and makes semantic integration a much easier job. The authors illustrate two enterprise use cases which build on this approach: entity-centric publishing, and entity-centric corporate information management, currently being developed by two leading companies in their respective fields.