Define the concept of "entity mappings"

[matentzn]

Preferred name: named entity mapping

Alternative names: entity mapping, correspondence, entity resolution, record linkage

Definition:

A category of mapping that connects named entities—such as genes, chemicals, places, or organizations—across different databases or vocabularies, often to support disambiguation, integration, or enrichment of structured data.

[matentzn]

From @jonquet

In Ontology Matching (Euzenat & Shvaiko, 2nd ed., 2013), the authors define correspondences (also sometimes called mappings) as follows:

[Euzenat & Shvaiko, Ontology Matching, Springer, 2nd ed., 2013]

“A correspondence is a semantic relation between two ontology entities, typically from different ontologies.”

More formally, a correspondence is defined as a tuple:

⟨e₁, e₂, r, n⟩, where: • e₁ is an entity from ontology O₁, • e₂ is an entity from ontology O₂, • r is a relation (e.g., equivalence ≡, subsumption ⊑, disjointness, etc.), • n is a confidence value in [0,1] representing the degree of belief in the correspondence.

The set of these correspondences forms an alignment between the ontologies. See other issue.

[matentzn]

Yes, entity mappings is a generalisation of ontology alignment, in that the entities can be any symbol used to refer to a thing in the real world - not just schema, ontology, database, etc. So we need something a little less ontology-y

[maweber-bia]

I would say that entity mappings are a kind of "output" of the matching/mapping process...