Assigning semantic types

Assigning a semantic type to the entity, link, and property types in your schema is a way of further categorizing and identifying relationships within your data. i2 applications can use semantic information to infer that two things are like each other, even if they don't have the same entity, link, or property type.

About this task

For some forms of analysis, i2 software interprets entities, links, and properties based on their semantic types:

  • You might assign the Motor Vehicle semantic type to a Car entity type and a Bus entity type. If you search for motor vehicles on a chart, Analyst's Notebook can find entities of both types.

  • In the Semantic Type Library, Passport Number and Social Security Number are both children of the National Identifier semantic type. An external search that requires seeds with National Identifier properties will accept any entity with a property that has any of its child semantic types.

Note: In an i2 Analyze deployment that uses several schemas, such as one that retrieves data from external sources, assigning appropriate semantic types is especially important. Entity, link, and property types don't necessarily match across schemas, but semantic types do.

Procedure

To assign a semantic type to your entity, link, or property type:

  1. In the Schema Designer application window, select the type that you want to assign a semantic type to.

  2. In the type on the right of the window, click Select next to the Semantic Type field to open the Select Semantic Type window.

    The window provides a view of the i2 Semantic Type Library, which contains the semantic types that are shared by all i2 applications.

  3. Browse the library to find and select the semantic type that categorizes your data as specifically as possible.

    Note: If you can't find an appropriate semantic type in the library, consider creating a custom semantic type.

  4. Click Assign to set the semantic type and close the window.