E91 Co-Reference Assignment in Version 6.0

This class comprises actions of making the assertion whether two or more particular instances of E89 Propositional Object refer to the same instance of E1 CRM Entity. The assertion is based on the assumption that this was an implicit fact being made explicit by this assignment. Use of this class allows for the full description of the context of this assignment.   The Actor making the assertion may have different kinds of confidence in the truth of the asserted fact of co-reference, because it may imply an interpretation of the (past) knowledge behind the propositional objects assumed to be co-referring. This kind of confidence can be described by using the property P2 has type (is type of). In case different propositional attitudes should be expressed per asserted propositional object, the assertion has accordingly to be divided into one instance of E91 Co-Reference Assignment for each kind of confidence.

This class aims at the problem of interpreting within a particular passage of an historical text, to which real-world entity a particular name, pronoun or equivalent expression was intended to refer by the texts author. In other words, it expresses the uncertainty of the creator of the assertion about the meaning of the information provided by another person.

Each such interpretation can only be documented with respect to another reference – either found in another text by the same or a different author, and/or by referring to the world known to the creator of the co-reference assertion. To do the latter, the property P155 has co-reference target (is co-reference target of) allows for referring to an instance of CRM Entity of the creator’s world. In a sense, the respective instance of E91 Co-Reference Assignment using the property P155 has co-reference target (is co-reference target of) in a knowledge base forms propositional object referring to the creator’s target entity, since a knowledge base as a whole can be seen as a propositional object. Consequently, if in a Semantic Web implementation the target entity is instantiated by a URI, the meaning of this identifier must be unambiguous to the creator of the co-reference assignment. Similarly, a URI of another authority, such as an author catalogue of a library, can be interpreted as a referring proposition of this catalogue, and be referred to by the property P153 assigned co-reference to (was regarded to co-refer by) or P154 assigned non co-reference to (was regarded not to co-refer by): E89 Propositional Object in order to express that it does not immediately represent the creator’s known world. In this case, the authority that knows the meaning of this URI must be unambiguous by the form of the URI itself.

In contrast, the meaning of the property ‘owl:same_as’ of  the OWL knowledge representation language cannot specify who’s knowledge it represents and cannot express kind of confidence. Therefore it is not adequate to model the progress of scholarly co-reference research .