Entity Resolution

What is entity resolution?

Entity Resolution is the task of finding every instance of an entity, such as a customer, across all enterprise systems, applications, and knowledge bases on-premises and in the cloud.

Why is entity resolution important?

In the modern world, the speed and volume of data that businesses must manage has increased exponentially. Because customer data exists in multiple systems and applications across the enterprise, it can be challenging to find all records that pertain to one entity (customer). There may not be a unique identifier within every record that indicates which records from one source correspond to those in other sources. What’s more, fields within records that represent the same entity may have differing information, e.g., one record may have the address misspelled; another record may be missing fields. 

An entity resolution approach helps companies make inferences across vast volumes of information in enterprise systems and applications by bringing together records that correspond to the same entity (customer). 

The approach contains the following steps:  

• Standardization converts data with more than one possible representation into a standard form; e.g., all telephone numbers appear as (xxx) xxx-xxxx. 
• Deduplication eliminates redundant copies of repeating data; e.g., duplicate customer records.
• Record matching or linking is the process of identifying records that refer to the same entity across different data sources.

How Precisely can help

Spectrum Discovery is Precisely’s end-to-end solution for data discovery, profiling, and cataloging. With Spectrum Discovery you can:

• Find and access necessary data: Spectrum Discovery enables you to connect to disparate databases, accounts, and transactions and identify key data associated with business entities. 
• Improve the data quality: Spectrum Discovery Standardizes all forms of data. It also verifies and validates missing information, so you can detect matches even in records with misspellings, nicknames, or cultural variances. 
• Match and link records into entities: Once the quality of your data is improved, sophisticated data matching algorithms and capabilities are configurable so you can adjust to your specific use case. The use of unique identifiers makes it easy to correlate, link, and access data on all parties.

Visualize relationships and patterns with the addition of Spectrum Context Graph. Its unique visualization of networks, maps, and interested third-parties makes it easy to spot non-obvious relationships so you can detect suspicious activity, consolidate fraud cases, and provide analysts with the information they need to resolve investigations with speed and precision.

The benefits of entity resolution are tremendous, particularly for public sector related to health, transportation, finance, law enforcement, and antiterrorism.

Learn how data matching and entity resolution solutions help you obtain deeper insights, effective governance, and compliance to support your strategic initiatives.