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Abstract A central challenge in topological data analysis is the interpretation of barcodes. The classical algebraic-topological approach to interpreting homology classes is to build maps to spaces whose homology carries semantics we understand and then to appeal to functoriality. However, we often lack such maps in real data; instead, we must rely on a cross-dissimilarity measure between our observations of a system and a reference. In this paper, we develop a pair of computational homological algebra approaches for relating persistent homology classes and barcodes:persistent extension, which enumerates potential relations between homology classes from two complexes built on the same vertex set, and the method ofanalogous bars, which utilizes persistent extension and the witness complex built from a cross-dissimilarity measure to provide relations across systems. We provide an implementation of these methods and demonstrate their use in comparing homology classes between two samples from the same metric space and determining whether topology is maintained or destroyed under clustering and dimensionality reduction.