Rough Set Semantics for Identity on the Web

Identity relations are at the foundation of the Linked Open Data initiative and on the Semantic Web in gen- eral. They allow the interlinking of alternative descrip- tions of the same thing. However, many practical uses of owl:sameAs are known to violate its formal seman- tics. We propose a method that assigns meaning to (the subrelations of) an identity relation using the predicates of the dataset schema. Applications of this approach include automated suggestions for asserting/retracting identity pairs and quality assessment. We also describe an experimental design for this approach.