Identity Resolution Daily

By the Infoglide Team

cnet news: What you need to know about e-health records

“Supporters say electronic medical records will boost the quality of medical care, reduce duplication of services, and limit errors, all of which could save money and lives. The National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine estimates that between 44,000 and 98,000 people in the United States die each year because of errors such as being prescribed medicine to which they are allergic.”

tricityherald.com: Travel restrictions to get tighter June 1

” Beginning June 1, travelers will need either a U.S. passport, a state-issued enhanced driver’s license, a U.S. passport card or a trusted traveler card to enter the country through land or seaports. Passports were made mandatory for air travel in 2007.”

Las Vegas Sun: Fusion center’s attention on prevention

“The trio appeared to be doing the kind of photographic surveillance terrorists might do before they strike a target, the officers concluded. So they contacted the Southern Nevada Counter-Terrorism Center. The center is run by Metro Police and houses investigators and analysts from local, state and federal law enforcement agencies in Southern Nevada.”

Destination CRM Blog: Tom Siebel Sends His Regrets

“Our customer data is now more siloed than it ever was, it doesn’t match, and the owners of the respective systems that process it don’t talk to each other much. The single version of the truth has eluded us. We’re still trying to sell customers products they already have.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Let’s Be Reasonable

“A recent post, ‘Terrorist Watchlist, Troubling Flaws Revealed’, starts out by making a valid point. If the terrorist watchlist is flawed, then the name matching results against such a list will be flawed. The author then goes on to reach related conclusions through rationalization rather than reasoning.”

Acxiom: Prognostications for the New Year 

“Identity resolution will get its due. Sure, you can call it infrastructure. Processing and rules intensive, customer identity resolution has been relegated to the underlying algorithms of third-party data providers, MDM, and data quality vendors. However, companies are recognizing that they may have unique customer data-matching needs-a bank we work with has more than 50 definitions of a household-and they’ll be looking at smarter, more specialized ways to automate them.”

Dallas Morning News: Dallas Police Department’s Fusion Center outsmarts criminals

“Chief David Kunkle, who championed the unit’s formation in January 2007, refers to it as the “brains” of a department that reported a 10 percent drop in crime last year and a nearly 19 percent decline in the first quarter of this year.”

datanomic: Fractured approaches to Sanctions Screening put UK Companies at risk, says new FSA report

“‘The use of multiple identities is common in the criminal world and Al-Qaeda’s own training manual requires its operatives to use false identities to hide their terrorist activities. Exploiting variations of a criminal’s real name is, perhaps, the simplest way of acquiring a new identity. Typical approaches are to use name variations or switching the order of names,’ added Pearson. ‘Other data, such as dates of birth are often manipulated simply by transposing digits.’”

Cloud Computing Journal: Experian QAS Launches QAS Pro On Demand

“‘By offering address verification in a SaaS model, we are enabling organizations of all sizes to maintain accurate contact data in a cost-effective platform,’ said Joel Curry, chief operating officer, Experian QAS. ‘As businesses change over time, our new infrastructure is able to adapt to shifting demands.’

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By the Infoglide Team

BI Blogs: Business Intelligence - The Unconquered Territories

“Let’s face it - There are technology limitations. Operational BI (Lack of real-time data access), Guided analytics (Lack of comprehensive business metadata), Information as a Service (Lack of SOA based BI architecture) are some of those technology limitations that come to my mind.”

SecurityInfoWatch: RILA survey: Retail crime on rise

“Some 72 percent of respondents said they have seen an increase in organized retail crime (ORC), and 52 percent said they had experienced a rise in financial fraud. Paul Jones, vice president of asset protection for RILA, noted that the increase in ORC should set off alarms not only within the retail community, but also within the business and law enforcement community. Organized retail crime typically involves organized groups of criminals operating shoplifting rings which have networks to fence their stolen goods, which may also appear on Internet auction sites like eBay, as well as at flea markets.”

Fast Company: Work/Life: “Secure Flight” Takes to the Air in August

“So now is the time to examine your driver’s license or passport to see that your first name, middle initial (if you use one), and last name appeared exactly the same across all of your identification. If you need a new photo for your driver’s license, now is the time to get it. Being consistent with your name also means that all of your bookings - including air, hotel, and car rental - must be consistent.”

SmartDataCollective: Enterprise Data World 2009

[Jim Harris] “Enterprise Data World is the business world’s most comprehensive vendor-neutral educational event about data and information management.  This year’s program was bigger than ever before, with more sessions, more case studies, and more can’t-miss content.”

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By John Talburt, PhD, CDMP, Director, UALR Laboratory for Advanced Research in Entity Resolution and Information Quality (ERIQ)

In my March 25, 2009 post “The Myth of Matching,” I discussed the confusion between entity resolution and matching as in record de-duplication.  Matching is a necessary part of entity resolution, but it is not sufficient.  In particular I brought up the issue of “false negatives,” cases where records don’t match, but are in fact references to the same entity.  I used the example of Mary Doe living on Elm Street who married John Smith living on Pine Street resulting in two references “Mary Doe, 234 Elm St” and “Mary Smith, 456 Pine St” that don’t match, but are never-the-less references to the same person.  Let’s discuss a couple of approaches to solving this problem - enlarging the scope of identity attributes and utilizing asserted associations.

The Mary Doe - Mary Smith case might be resolved if the scope of identity attributes were increased, i.e. if additional information such as date-of-birth, drivers license, or social security number were available in both records.  But as anyone acquainted with information quality understands, acquiring and maintaining additional information can create as many problems as it solves.  It also brings up a number of questions that the information custodians and collectors must answer.

Is this information available? Is it costly? Is use for this purpose permissible/legal?  Even if expanding the number of identity attributes is an option, it is not necessarily a panacea.  Increasing the number of identity attributes also increases the complexity of the matching.  What if some values are missing?  What if some values agree, but others disagree?

A second approach is to collect and use asserted associations.  The fundamental problem is that if Mary Doe and Mary Smith do not share any matching identity attributes, you cannot know that they are the same person without some separately acquired knowledge that they are in fact the same person.  Moreover, because not all Mary Doe’s are the same person as Mary Smith, you also need additional context such as the address to make the connection clear.  The upshot is that you need to possess the explicit knowledge that “Mary Doe at 234 Elm St is the same person as Mary Smith at 456 Pine St.”

If Mary lives in the United States and Mary registers her change of name and address with the US Postal Service, then you might be able to resolve this through the USPS Change of Address file.  Besides the fact that this is only helpful in the US, relying on the USPS COA file has other disadvantages, not the least of which is that Mary may have decided not to register with the USPS.  For this reason, some companies choose to maintain their own knowledge by acquiring information from other public and private sources.

For example in the US, marriage records are publicly available and are a possible source of this associative information.  It may also be true that while Mary didn’t register her change of address with the USPS, she may have wanted to avoid missing any issues of her Modern Square Dancing magazine subscription and promptly registered her change of address with the publisher.  There are potentially many other data sources, such as changes in utility service, cable service, or required licensure notifications.

Even though the application of external association information can alleviate the false negative problem, it comes at a cost.  The collection and maintenance of associative information can be a monumental task for some types of entities. For example, at least 20% of the US population moves each year.  Because it is too large a task for most organizations to take on by themselves, companies that aggregate large amounts of associative data sometimes offer the application of this knowledge as a product.

In the next installment, I will discuss another common confusion, the difference between entity resolution and identity resolution.

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By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer

Judging from recent remarks by Dr. Leonard Schaefer and Edward Lull Jr., the need for identity resolution is heightened by the turbulent economic circumstances of the “interesting times” we find ourselves living in.  While specifically referring to name analytics in a recent article in Bank Systems and Technology, the point applies equally to the identity resolution solutions which encompass name analytics. The authors state that:

As big enterprise applications such as CRM are no longer the center of the IT universe, more attention is being focused on the information itself. Banks today have now become more reliant on customer information—independent of applications and business processes to make faster and smarter business decisions in response to changing market conditions.

They go on to detail four factors in international financial service organizations that drive the use of new software technologies to resolve identities using name information: compliance, customer data consolidation and quality, CRM assets review, and continuity of service.

Compliance – Key banking initiatives are anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) compliance that seek to prevent money that flows into financial institutions from ending up in the hands of prohibited groups.

Customer data consolidation and quality – The prevalence of large mergers between multi-national banks is driving requirements for name-validation “at the moment of capture” to prevent bad data from entering business systems.

CRM assets review – Combining millions of accounts from more than one bank risks overwhelming existing CRM systems, so resolving identities early in the process can mitigate the risk of future problems.

Continuity of service – Not anticipating the impact of merging large customer databases can interrupt customer service, leading to negative consequences from customer dissatisfaction all the way to losing large blocks of customers.

In Identity Resolution Daily, we’ve often written about the growing market requirement for sophisticated identity resolution technology, and we like to share relevant information from other sources. The referenced article is worth the read.

As always, let us hear your thoughts and comments.

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This post is based on a March 31 interview with Infoglide Senior Vice President Douglas Wood by Linda L. Briggs for TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute), March 31, 2009. Click here to read the entire interview.

In a comprehensive discussion, Doug Wood of Infoglide Software spoke about an area of confusion that exists when people discuss identity resolution. He pointed out that the term is sometimes misapplied to describe software that performs data matching alone.

[An identity resolution engine is] software that allows organizations to connect disparate data sources in order to understand possible entity matches and non-obvious relationships. It boils down to this: Providing capabilities for organizations to understand “who’s who” and “who knows whom” across multiple data silos. Occasionally, when we introduce the concept of identity resolution technology to a new customer, their immediate response is “I see, but we already have a data matching engine.” The truth is, identity resolution engines have data matching at the core, but [they] provide much more functionality and flexibility than that.

So if identity resolution incorporates data matching, what really differentiates it from data matching products?

Perhaps the key element of an identity resolution engine is the ability to take the entity match and relationship results, then apply domain-specific rules to them. How does the enterprise treat Customer A by virtue of the fact that he or she has some non-obvious relationship with Customer B? The answer to that question is specific to the domain.

Most of us are familiar with the use of data matching for removing duplicates from databases and in cleansing input for data warehouses and master data management, but identity resolution is used in unique ways.

With identity resolution technology, data isn’t subjected to deterioration processes such as cleansing or record merging. Rather, the data can remain in its original state and in its original location.

What this means is that identity resolution is especially adept at uncovering risk, fraud, and conflicts of interest since the “forensic value of individual records is preserved for ongoing analysis.” While government is a key market for identity resolution engines, a growing number of commercial applications are emerging in financial services (e.g., PATRIOT Act compliance, detection of loan fraud and credit card fraud), retail (e.g., uncovering organized retail crime activities by comparing shoplifters with employees or frequent merchandise returners), workers compensation (e.g., finding employers that change attributes to avoid paying premiums), lottery corporations (e.g., compare winning ticket holders against lottery retail employees to discover potential fraud), and customer relationship management (e.g., keeping two similar records unmerged until birth date attribute uncovers a father/son relationship).

What prevents traditional data matching products from addressing these problems?

There are no problems with matching engines per se. They just aren’t identity resolution engines. Matching engines typically use one or two algorithms, perhaps mathematical in nature, that examine structured data looking for name matches. They provide an improvement over Soundex, but little more. What they do is say “Yes, this is a match” or “No, this is not a match.”

Common requirements for solving identity resolution problems include connecting to more diverse data types and formats, handling higher volumes, and delivering deeper insight into non-obvious relationships from existing uncleansed data sources.

If identity resolution engines have existed for years, what has caused the recent rush to employ them?

As part of the 9/11 Commission recommendations, the Department of Homeland Security began a robust search for identity resolution technology that could keep terrorists off airplanes by comparing passenger attributes against terrorist watch lists, no-fly lists, and other types of threat-related data. Through a few iterations, the selection and implementation process evolved into the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) Secure Flight Program, which ultimately thrust identity resolution technology into the limelight. Secure Flight is now widely recognized as the pre-eminent use case for identity resolution technology requirements today, and a number of companies are involved in delivering that solution.

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[Post from Infoglide] Ontology or Living Context?

“IBM’s Jeff Jonas recently wrote a post about what types of problems are appropriate for developing an ontology, i.e. “a rigorous and exhaustive organization of some knowledge domain that is usually hierarchical and contains all the relevant entities and their relations.”  His key point: as the complexity of the data that the ontology is meant to organize increases, the value of the ontology decreases.”

Workers’ Compensation Perspectives: Workers’ Compensation Fraud

“Workers’ compensation fraud is not a victimless crime. The victims of such frauds are not really the workers’ compensation insurers. Instead, the victims are those who play by the rules–the workers, employers and providers/suppliers of services. Workers receive more scrutiny of their claims, employers are subject to more audits and must bear the costs not being covered by those fraudulently under-reporting payroll.”

Chicago Tribune: New airport security rules to require more personal information

“Requiring the airlines to collect more personal information will improve the quality of the watch lists that contain names of possible terrorism and criminal suspects, federal authorities said. It’s also being done to reduce the misidentification of innocent travelers who are mistakenly placed on “no-fly” lists because their names are similar to those found on watch lists—a situation the TSA calls ‘a frustratingly common occurrence.’”

Forrester Blog: BI Nirvana

[Boris Evelson] “I had an amazing client experience the other day. I searched long and hard for a client with flawless, perfect, 100% efficient and effective BI environment and applications. My criteria were tough and that’s why it took me so long (I’ve been searching for as long as I’ve been in the BI business, almost 30 years).”

Insurance Journal: Texas Mutual Fraud Investigations Recover $4.1M in 2008

“According to the company, the $4.1 million includes: claimant fraud future savings of $2,185,170; restitution of $39,374 from claimants; restitution of $1,569,873 in premium fraud; and prevention of $301,467 in health care provider fraud and abusive billing.”

TAWPI Blog: Mastering Data Management

“MDM tends to come across like an infrastructure project or middleware — something that IT would sponsor, according to Dan Power, president of Hub Solution Designs Inc., an MDM consulting firm. But placing sponsorship with IT misses the point, he said. The line of business needs to sponsor the project because it can identify the business value the data holds and how a single view of that data can affect the bottom line.”

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By the Infoglide Team

Background Now: AG Seeks Injunction Against Contractors Asset Protection Association, Inc. (ConAPA) and Eugene Magre

“‘This company falsely promised its clients that if they gave their employees empty titles and worthless shares of stock they could avoid tens of thousands of dollars in workers compensation premiums,’ Attorney General Brown said. ‘But you can’t simply call a security guard a vice president and avoid complying with the law through a sophisticated and fraudulent scheme.’”

DailyTech: New Bills Target Stolen Merchandise Sold Online

“Under the new legislation, the brick and mortar retailers would score a major coup in that they could order eBay.com, Overstock.com, and Amazon.com to remove numerous goods without any proof.  Under the proposed laws, failure by the online retailers to ‘expeditiously investigate’ and remove the items would result in criminal penalties.”

BeyeNetwork: Business Drivers and Master Data

“Is the actual business need for a single version of the data, or just multiple versions, each of which is of higher quality? Drill down into this a little bit and you may need additional information from your business customers. What constitutes a requirement for master data? A situation in which two business processes need to have a fully shared view of the same representation of a data item?”

Web of Data: Report on Data Discovery by Bloor Research

“…there are now a number of products on the market that can discover data relationships that do not fall within the category of either data profiling or data quality. As a result, it is time to consider the importance of data discovery, and its requirements, as a market in its own right.”

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By the Infoglide Team

[Post from Infoglide] Rules-Based and Probabilistic Entity Resolution

“If you’ve followed recent developments in the entity resolution market, including the recent re-positioning of existing vendors like Netrics and Initiate Systems, you may have heard discussion about the relative merits of rules-based entity resolution using attribute-specific analytics versus probabilistic entity resolution that uses mathematical analytics exclusively.”

[Post from Infoglide] Entity Extraction: The Flip Side of Entity Resolution

“Under our working definition of entity resolution as locating and merging references to the same entity, the last installment focused on the merge problem, and how matching is often used as a stand-in for ER.  Now let’s take a look at the locating problem.”

NY State Dept. of Labor: Monroe County Contractors Arrested on Charges of Fraudulently Misclassifying Employees

“‘I know times are tough, and employers are looking to cut costs wherever they can,’ said M. Patricia Smith, Commissioner of the Department of Labor. ‘But it is precisely because times are tough that employers must continue to obey the law. Workers misclassified as ‘independent contractors’ or paid off the books are not receiving protections they are entitled to - protections like unemployment insurance that are particularly critical, given today’s uncertain economy.’”

SearchSAP.com: Successful MDM strategy starts with finding broken processes, not technology

“MDM tends to come across like an infrastructure project or middleware — something that IT would sponsor, according to Dan Power, president of Hub Solution Designs Inc., an MDM consulting firm. But placing sponsorship with IT misses the point, he said.”

BeyeNetwork: The Impact of the Obama Healthcare Agenda on Business Intelligence

“There are several areas of the Obama-Biden plan that could have a significant impact on business intelligence if they come to fruition. The first is the intent to ‘invest in proven strategies to reduce preventable medical errors.’ First and foremost is wider adoption of electronic medical records (EMR).”

[Infoglide founder David Wheeler’s father Roger was an owner of World Jai Alai. Winter Hill Gang members James J. “Whitey” Bulger, Stephen Flemmi, and Johnny Martorano were indicted for his 1981 murder 20 years later in 2001.]  

Mercury News: Ex-FBI agent sentenced to 40 years in 1982 killing

“Former FBI agent John Connolly was sentenced Thursday to 40 years in prison for slipping information to Boston mobsters that led to the 1982 shooting death of a Miami gambling executive.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Shocking Behavior

“This will rock you to your core: bad guys who are the targets of law enforcement investigations try very hard to hide their identities whenever possible. OK, so maybe that isn’t so shocking. There are very few of us who have not heard the acronym ‘AKA’ (Also Known As). We associate such terms – AKA, alias, assumed name, handle, etc. – as signaling devious intent. Formal studies have shown that nearly a third of criminals have used false names for the purpose of intentional deception.”

nextgov: ‘Fusion center’ privacy fears persist

“As the program matures, the DHS Privacy Office anticipates discovering new privacy challenges that need to be addressed and the PIA will be updated whenever necessary, the document said. Additionally, the Privacy Office called for ‘a regular and ongoing examination of privacy issues within the fusion centers.’”

Toronto City News: OLG Bans Staff From Buying Tickets

“The move follows scathing criticism by ombudsman Andre Marin, who also suggested including lottery retailers in the ban. ‘If retailers, insiders, prove they are an ungovernable lot, then we should ban them from playing the lottery,’ he noted.”

North Country Gazette: Charter Bus Operator Accused Of Workers Comp Fraud

“According to investigators, DiPaolo failed to provide workers’ compensation insurance for the 25 employees of his school and charter bus service between 2006 and 2008, thereby avoiding payment of an estimated $130,000 in premiums.”

CIO: Data-Management Danger: Less Than Half of MDM Plans Are Effective

“So while many companies acknowledge their data problems and resultant poor decision-making processes, less than one-third of businesses have taken steps to remedy the situation with a data-governance program, according to the results. Thirteen percent of respondents said they were unclear as to what data governance was.”

Destination CRM: Megavendors Look Smart in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence

“The report calls 2008 ‘a year of transition’ following ‘the vendor merger and acquisition turbulence of 2007′ — a reference to the major acquisitions of Business Objects by SAP, Cognos by IBM, and Hyperion Solutions by Oracle.”

NOTE: Our next post will be on Wednesday, February 18. Happy President’s Day!

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