Entity Resolution and Information Quality

1. Principles of Entity Resolution

Entity Resolution

Entity resolution (ER) is the process of determining whether two references to real-world objects are referring to the same object or to different objects. The term entity describes the real-world object, a person, place, or thing, and the term resolution is used because ER is fundamentally a decision process to answer (resolve) the question, Are the references to the same or to different entities? Although the ER process is defined between pairs of references, it can be systematically and successively applied to a larger set of references so as to aggregate all the references to same object into subsets or clusters. Viewed in this larger context, ER is also defined as “the process of identifying ...