Entity Resolution and Information Quality

Foreword

Entity resolution is the process of probabilistically identifying some real thing based upon a set of possibly ambiguous clues. Humans have been performing entity resolution throughout history. Early humans looked at footprints and tried to match that clue to the animals that made the tracks. Later, people with special domain knowledge looked at the shape of a whale's spout to determine if the particular whale belonged to the right class of whale to hunt. During World War II, English analysts learned to identify individual German radio operators solely based upon that operator's “fist,” the timing and style the operator used to key Morse code.

In the middle of the twentieth century, people began applying the power of computers to the problem ...