Traditional methods of data analysis tend to be linguistic; comparison of concepts is based on the names these concepts have. More modern methods have introduced a more semantic approach, where the analyst will tend to analyse the meaning behind a word. Although these methods tend to produce more accurate comparisons, a lot of it depends on the analyst’s domain knowledge and linguistic interpretation. BORO is different to many other data analysis techniques in that treats the names of things as a secondary concern. With BORO, the analyst is forced to identify individual concepts by their extent. In the case of physical objects, this is their spatial/temporal extent. For types of things, the extent is set of things that are of that type.