Entity modeling: traces of an evolving path

Abstract

In this work we will deal with the subject of entities understood as real-world objects and how this concept is used in the context of entity modeling, that process of identification and modeling of entities that plays so much part in projects of con-version of catalogs into linked open data. The help in understanding what this concept expresses within the bibliographic universe comes from object-oriented programming, which introduces the concept of modeling and management of an “object” by defining its state and behavior. But to model an object it is necessary to identify it and this process must often take place dealing with massive amounts of data, not necessarily homogeneously structured: the Entity Resolution is this set of machine processes that tries to resolve the ambiguities given by the inhomogeneity of the descriptions referable to the same entity. The adoption of these practices, in the bibliographic field, still moves the horizon of the cataloging action, which had already extended towards the more general metadating, towards that web of data that imposes a new way of understanding objects and treating them: entity modeling promises to be the third generational step in the management of bibliographic data.