Simile

SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments) was a joint research project run by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries and MIT CSAIL and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project ran from 2003 to August 2008. It focused on developing tools to increase the interoperability of disparate digital collections. Much of SIMILE's technical focus is oriented towards Semantic Web technology and standards such as Resource Description Framework (RDF).

album Like a Virgin, in whose title track the narrative persona uses a simile, professing to be experiencing an erotic relationship "like a virgin". A simile ( ) is a type of figure of speech that directly compares two unrelated things, using wording to explicitly make the comparison (often, with a grammatical structure of the type "x is like y"). It is usually understood specifically to entail figurative comparison: thus "a wolf is like a dog" is merely a literal comparison, whereas the figurative "a man is like a wolf" is a simile. In the words of Michael Israel, Jennifer Riddle Harding, and Vera Tobin, "basically, a simile is just a way of describing a target by asserting its similarity to some unexpected entity". In English, similes are often made explicit by the word "like", as in "Odysseus is like a weasel", but the comparison in a simile can be made explicit in quite different ways, as in "the retirement of Yves Saint Laurent is the fashion equivalent of the breakup of the Beatles". Sometimes, extra information is included to explain precisely how the comparison is intended to work, as in "my kitchen is approximately the size of a postage stamp". ==Further reading== Michael Israel, Jennifer Riddle Harding, and Vera Tobin, "On Simile", in Language, Culture, and Mind, edited by Michel Achard and Suzanne Kemmer (CSLI Publications, 2004), pp. 123–35.

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=950586173 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.