Identity – The Philosophical Challenge For the Web by Matthew Hurst.
From the post:
I work in local search at Microsoft which means, like all those working in this space, I have to deal with an identity crisis on a daily basis. Currently, most local search products – like Bing’s and Google’s – leverage multiple data sets to derive a digital model of the world that users can then interact with. In creating this digital model, multiple statements have to be conflated to form a unified representation. This can be extremely challenging for two reasons. Firstly, the system has to decided when two records are intended to denote the same real world entity. Secondly, the designers of the system have to determine what real world entities are and how to describe them.
For example, if a business moves is that the same business or the closure of one and the opening of another? What does it mean to categorize a business? The cafe in Barnes and Noble is branded Starbucks but isn’t actually part of the Starbucks chain – should is surface as a separate entity or is it ‘hidden’ within the bookshop as an attribute (‘has cafe’)?
Thinking through these hard representational problems is as much part of the transformative trends going on in the tech industry as are those characterized by terms like ‘big data’ and ‘data scientist’.
Questions of identity and how to resolve different multiple references to the same entity have been debated at least since the time of Greek philosophers. Identity (Wikipedia page, see references on the various pages.)
This “philosophical challenge” has been going on for a very long time and so far I haven’t seen any demonstrations that the Web raises new questions.
You need to read Matthew’s identity example in his post.
The songs in question could be said to be instances of the same subject and a reference to that subject would be satisfied with any of those instances. From another point of view, the origin of the instances could be said to distinguish them into different subjects, say for proof of licensing purposes. Other view points are possible. Depends upon the purpose of your criteria of identification.