Introduction to Synonyms

A Synonym is defined in English as “a word or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word or phrase.” In the context of the Fluree Sense software as well, a Synonym works the same way.

Let us assume you have two Catalogs of related or the same business. In one of these businesses, they call a paying customer an ‘Account’ and in the other, as ‘Customer.’ Additionally, assume that in the Customer Semantic Object, we have something called Job and, in the Account Semantic Object, we have a Concept called Occupation. If these two things map to essentially the same or mostly the same data, it is very likely they are Synonyms.

Alternatively, if these are confirmed Synonyms, we could discover mappings for one based on the other.

This is a very simple example, but there could be many other complex cases. So here, Customer’s Job is Synonym of Account’s Occupation.

Imagine trying to discover and make sense of mappings across multiple catalogs, multiple businesses for such inter-related business vocabulary. Wouldn’t it be better if this could be automated by Machine Learning which would not only identify such Synonyms based on their mappings, but also extrapolate mappings on the basis of manually linked Synonyms?

So, let us look at creating some Synonyms in the next section.