Smushing

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Smushing is an informal term for 'merging data based on knowledge of uniquely identifying properties'.

DanBri wrote it up originally as aggregation strategies, but has since written up a nicer explanation: Identifying things in FOAF

More recently, there is a more reader-friendly writeup by Matt Biddulph, Sha1ing, smushing and aggregating FOAF which should illustrate the problem.

Basically, we are dealing with the problem of merging data about things which might not be consistently identified. My photo database might mention me by reference to my homepage; my calendar might associate me with one of my mailboxes; my FOAF file might mention both my homepage and my mailboxes, but not a lot else. FOAF tools need to smush all this data together, so they can get a more complete picture of what's going on.

Related Docs: 

* SmushTesting -- How does your RDF database perform at data-merging?
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