Aliases and Merge Risk - Biomedical Identifiers & Ontology Graphs Step by Step

Aliases help lookup but must resolve to stable identifiers before joins.

highlighted = computed this step

Aliases are not safe primary keys

Aliases help humans search, but aliases can merge, split, or collide. This slice has 4 records with aliases.

\text{alias rows}=4

The safe workflow is resolve first, then join by identifier. The canonical label is display text; it is not the database key.

\text{alias} \to \text{identifier} \to \text{join}