Semantic equivalence (computing)

This article is about semantic equivalence of metadata. For the concept in mathematical logic, see Logical equivalence. For the concept in linguistic semantics, see Semantic equivalence (linguistics).

In computer metadata, semantic equivalence is a declaration that two data elements from different vocabularies contain data that has similar meaning. There are three types of semantic equivalence statements:

Class or concept equivalence. A statement that two high level concepts have similar or equivalent meaning.
Property or attribute equivalence. A statement that two properties, descriptors or attributes of classes have similar meaning.
Instance equivalence. A statement that two instances of data are the same or refer to the same instance.

Example

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Assume that there are two organizations, each having a separate data dictionary. The first organization has a data element entry:

 <DataElement>
 <Name>PersonFamilyName</Name>
 <Definition>The name of a person shared with other members of their family.</Definition>
 <DataElement>

and a second organization has a data dictionary with a data element with the following entry:

 <DataElement>
 <Name>IndividualLastName</Name>
 <Definition>The name of an individual person shared with other members of their family.</Definition>
 <DataElement>

these two data elements can be considered to have the same meaning and can be marked as semantically equivalent.