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 data exists in multiple systems and applications across the enterprise, it can be challenging to find all records that pertain to one entity (e.g. 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

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.