Entity Identification on the Semantic Web

In the core of every information integration and data exchange effort lies the ability to identify whether two pieces of information refer to the same real world entity. This ability is of paramount importance for all those applications and systems currently operating in the highly heterogeneous web environment. Research in data management has long ago exploited features like keys or schema constraints for dealing with that issue, but the web reality has brought new challenges. In this work we survey a number of entity disambiguation and identification techniques and tools that can be used in semantic web applications and more specifically, into an entity management system for the semantic web.