Communicating and resolving entity references

Abstract

Statements about entities occur everywhere, from newspapers and web pages to structured databases. Correlating references to entities across systems that use different identifiers or names for them is a widespread problem. In this paper, we show how shared knowledge between systems can be used to solve this problem. We present "reference by description", a formal model for resolving references. We provide some results on the conditions under which a randomly chosen entity in one system can, with high probability, be mapped to the same entity in a different system.