The comparing of entities is usually important in human decision making. 

We are constantly comparing entities daily from holiday destinations, new mobile phone and next family car. Comparing entities look at the relatedness of these objects or concepts. Relatedness does not look at only similarity (analogy) but other relational structures such as resistance (antithesis), discrepancy (anomaly) and incompatibility (antinomy). 

Comparative entity mining is crucial to any keyword, concept, content, product and marketing strategy. This is because no product exists in isolation. It is therefore important for businesses to place themselves in the shoes of potential customers and explore the alternative products that are vying for the same attention and mind space. Conducting this exercise will help brands position their products in a more compellingly through  through engaging branding and compelling storytelling. 

The field of biomedical informatics have employed comparative entity mining between genes and proteins. These comparisons have now extended to diseases. The comparisons in the biomedical field looks at functional similarities more than sequential similarities. This has inspired me to classify comparative entity mining to three stages: structural, functional and sequential. 

This blog will focus on the structural stage of comparing entities. We will be comparing bananas to plantains. When looking at an entity or a concept from the structural level we focus more on the size, colour, shape and physical properties. The internal properties that make up the product. 

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