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Vol. I · No. 251
Mon · 8 Jun
A Daily Lexicon of Trustworthy Data
The Lexicon

006·31

entity resolution

/ˈɛn.tɪ.ti ˌrɛz.əˈluː.ʃən/ - n.

1 [colloq.] Deciding whether these four customers are one customer, a question the org would rather bill four times than answer once.Keep. Punchy.This is the problem.

Working definition

2. The process of determining which records across systems refer to the same real-world entity and linking or merging them.

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See also
  • deduplicationThe quarterly project to merge the duplicate customers, which itself runs in three teams under two names.
  • golden recordThe one true version of the customer, assembled from five wrong ones by a rule no one in the room can recite.
  • keys and identityThe unanswered question of whether two rows are the same person, deferred until a regulator asks it for you.
  • master dataThe handful of nouns the entire company depends on and no single function will admit it owns.