Identity Resolution Daily

[Post from Infoglide] Master Data Movement

“I read with interest yesterday’s article at SeekingAlpha which discusses rumors swirling around the MDM software industry.  According to the article, sources suggest that two deals are very near completion.  The first of those rumored transactions would see Informatica picking up MDM provider Siperian.  On the heels of their acquisitions of Identity Systems and AddressDoctor, the Siperian purchase could not be totally unexpected – but would most certainly create some ripple effect worth watching.”

[Post from Infoglide] Connecting the Dots: We May Be Closer Than We Think

“Paul Rosenzweig, former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security, recently posted an intriguing piece on Harvard National Security Journal about connecting the dots regarding the Christmas Bomber. He makes a strong case that a decision to stop research on data analytic tools in 2003 has contributed to the problem analysts face today in making sense of the massive and manifold data sources they sift through.”

Forrester Blog: Introducing The MDM Market’s Newest 800lb Gorilla: Informatica Acquires Siperian!

“In the short term, I’m sure Informatica will be more than happy to continue to collect revenue from Oracle while keeping this partnership alive, but don’t expect future negotiated contracted terms to remain very reasonable as Informatica gains traction with its MDM strategy. No matter how often Oracle says how happy they are to maintain a friendly state of co-opetition with strategic partners, I don’t anticipate they will want to run the risk of a competitor pulling the rug out from under its aggressive MDM strategy.”

News8Austin: Community forum poses questions about Fusion Center

“According to department officials, sharing information with neighboring jurisdictions as well as state and federal agencies ensures that crime history and other information is shared outside the city limits. The department said it the center will be one that ‘analyzes information in order to best detect, respond and hopefully prevent criminal and terrorist activity — as well as other public safety hazards.’”

Ramon Chen: Informatica + Siperian Acquisition = Premier MDM Platform

“As expected, Informatica has announced that it has acquired Siperian (disclosure, my former company) for $130M… If predictions are correct, this will be a relative ‘bargain’ when compared with the upcoming IBM and Initiate Systems tie up which is expected to be 4 to 5x Initiate’s $90M annual revenues.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Healthcare Identity Resolution Confusion

“Confusion about medical records can lead to chaos. We’ve all heard horror stories about hospital tragedies caused by misidentification of a patient, such as applying an unnecessary surgery. It’s hard to overemphasize the importance of correct, unambiguous information in the practice of medicine. Knowing as much as possible about a patient enables a practitioner to reach a correct diagnosis and the proper treatment regimen in the least amount of time.”

NewsandSentinel.com: Local officials do their part to fight terrorism

“Tom Campbell, a consultant on terrorist issues who has worked with Sandy in the past, has been in the field of counter-terrorism for 14 years. We do not profile based on ethnicity and race, what we do is profile behavior,” said Campbell. “Terrorism is evolutionary. Terrorists are always changing their behavior, appearances and tactics. What we try to do to prevent terrorism is focus on the behavior. That’s how we disrupt it before it happens. The emphasis is on prevention.”

intelligent enterprise: Predicting BI Highlights for 2010

“Cloud computing and SaaS will become less niche as both BI heavy weights and vertically-focused vendors recognize that the infrastructure side of BI offers little competitive advantage; instead, it’s the time-to-value and agility. IT owners who don’t want to give up any control are in for a bruising.”

ISRIA: Testimony of Secretary Napolitano before the Senate Committee on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, “Intelligence Reform: The Lessons and Implications of the Christmas Day Attack”

“DHS uses TSDB data, managed by the Terrorist Screening Center that is administered by the FBI, to determine who may board, who requires further screening and investigation, who should not be admitted, or who should be referred to appropriate law enforcement personnel. Specifically, to help make these determinations, DHS uses the No-Fly List and the Selectee List, two important subsets within the TSDB. Individuals on the No-Fly List should not receive a boarding pass for a flight to, from, over, or within the United States.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Entity-Based Integration Model

“From a business standpoint, entity resolution (ER) is really the first step of a two-part process of integrating information about entities.  Entity reference records usually carry two types of attributes describing the entity, identifying attributes and informational attributes. Although the line between the two can be fuzzy, identifying attributes are those that describe the entity’s ‘characteristics,’ information that tends to persist over time and helps to distinguish one entity from another of the same type.”

Healthcare Technology Online: 10 Healthcare IT Trends To Watch In 2010

“According to the latest statistics from HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society), only 0.5% of U.S. hospitals currently have a complete EMR (electronic medical record) system that provides data continuity throughout the institution. Hospitals and healthcare systems will install, integrate, and enhance EMR systems at an accelerated pace in an effort to demonstrate ‘meaningful use’ and capitalize on ARRA incentives.”

InformationWeek: Airline Security: The Technical Task Of Connecting Dots

“Pulling those data streams together–from federal agencies, law enforcement, foreign governments, and private sector companies–and getting that information to the right people quickly and in useable format are huge technical challenges. While there were obvious missed opportunities in the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, including failure to take action with information in hand, it would be a mistake to underestimate the end-to-end data integration effort required as one of, simply, ‘connecting the dots.’”

ChannelWeb: Gartner: Cloud Computing Contributes To Mass IT Asset Exodus

“Cloud computing will take such a stranglehold on the market as companies try to reduce hardware spending that Gartner has made the bold proclamation that one-fifth of all businesses will own absolutely no IT assets come 2012.”

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By Brian Calvert, Infoglide Senior Software Architect

The recent “Christmas Bomber” incident incited many posts about applying technology to address the gaps that allowed it to happen. For example, David Loshin wrote about a piece for BeyeNETWORK about a “master terrorist system” while Lawrence Dubov suggested improving the watch list process using entity resolution. While technology is a critical component of any solution, some specific issues about the technology are important to understand.

In an address this week, President Obama outlined the shortcomings in people, processes, and technologies that gave the now infamous Christmas Bomber the opportunity to take down a Detroit-bound flight.

President Obama identified three major problem areas:

It’s now clear that shortcomings occurred in three broad and compounding ways. First, although our intelligence community had learned a great deal about the al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen called al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — that we knew that they sought to strike the United States, and that they were recruiting operatives to do so — the intelligence community did not aggressively follow up on and prioritize particular streams of intelligence related to a possible attack against the homeland.

Second, this contributed to a larger failure of analysis — a failure to connect the dots of intelligence that existed across our intelligence community, and which together could have revealed that Abdulmutallab was planning an attack.

Third, this in turn fed into shortcomings in the watch-listing system which resulted in this person not being placed on the no-fly list; thereby allowing him to board that plane in Amsterdam for Detroit.

CNN highlighted one additional failing that’s relevant to the topic of Identity Resolution (my emphasis):

A timeline provided by the State Department officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, showed that an initial check of the suspect based on his father’s information failed to disclose he had a multiple-entry U.S. visa. The reason was that AbdulMutallab’s name was misspelled. “That search did not come back positive,” said one official, who called it a quick search without using multiple variants of spelling.

What are the specific technology issues?

While the details of the technologies used by the State Department are not identified, the story is typically the same for government and industry. Simple equivalency lookups are not enough. “John Kennedy” will not match “Jhon Kennedy” with standard database lookups. Furthermore, some technologies rely on strategies that actually destroy the forensic integrity of the data. They force it into pre-existing molds in a variety of ways to perform similarity matching. We’ve addressed the many challenges to matching names in this blog in the past, especially in “Playing the Name Game with Terrorist Watch Lists and Shoplifter Databases”.

Indexing is one approach that can fail. It tries to turn common names and known variations and nicknames into identical easily matched tokens. So John, Jack, and Johnny might all translate to “F12391″, facilitating a quick match. But what happens when John’s name — like AbdulMutallab’s — is misspelled? “Jhon” will fail to be matched to the common code and, thus, the match will quickly fail. Encoding is another common example that we addressed. Algorithms like “soundex” attempt to translate words into a fuzzy phonetic equivalent. But the promise of these algorithms falls short, especially when they encounter misspellings, nicknames, and cultural variations.

So while merging all information into a common view or improving watchlist management might be part of the solution, they will still fail if the technology used to merge or search is not up to the task.

Not all identity resolution technologies are the same. Ours can be configured using a number of strategies to fit particular customer performance requirements, sensitivity to false positives or false negatives, and Similarity Search behaviors, including specialized name algorithms that catch misspellings, nicknames, and ordering variations.

Although the consequences are grimmer in homeland security situations, the challenges are the same for financial, healthcare, gaming, state and local government, and marketing applications. While it remains to be seen what improvements the US government will apply to the people, processes, and technology used to secure the country, it’s easy to see that simple misspellings need not break the system or, for that matter, any other system.

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By the Infoglide Team

Center for Advanced Public Safety: SHARE & PUSH

“While SHARE is strictly for communications between law enforcement and the state’s Fusion Center, a companion portal, called the Portal to Uphold a Secure Homeland (PUSH), was also developed as part of the USDHS ITEP project to support private sector security personnel who oversee critical infrastructure.”

HealthNewsDigest.com: Medical/Healthcare Privacy and Fraud Outlook for 2010

“You may not be aware of this, but medical-related fraud and identity theft are growing problems in America. With the exploding cost of healthcare, increasing bureaucratic administrative healthcare systems, and a large, aging Baby Boomer population requiring increased medical care, it would seem that we are entering into a kind of ‘perfect storm’ for medical fraud.”

Aerospace News & Views: Business Travel Association Calls for Greater Attention to Aviation Security

“NBTA has long supported risk-management programs that enhance aviation security. TSA’s Secure Flight helps to enhance domestic and international travel through the use of improved watch list matching, while the US-VISIT program collects biometric information from international travelers, both of which help to protect travelers and our nation. These programs should be used as readily available tools to improve the system that protects our global aviation security.”

[Wes Richel] Gartner: Simple Interop: Why We Don’t Seek a Top Level Domain Name

“Should anyone need a demonstration of the difficulties that delay reaching global agreements, consider that the term “EHR” has an idiosyncratic definition in the U.S. when compared to most of the world. In the U.S. the term refers to the record of patient information that is kept by an individual care delivery organization (CDO), with the proviso that there be some degree of interoperability. In most other countries that use the term it refers to some specific sharing of information that may be sourced from many places including but not limited to the electronic patient records of individual CDOs.”

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By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior VP & Chief Marketing Officer

Identity resolution is a vital technology for law enforcement fusion centers, and we’ve often followed developments with links to stories in this area. When overlapping and adjacent jurisdictions share data with each other, uncovering hidden identities and linkages greatly accelerates the detection of criminal activity.

This map shows current and planned deployments of state and local fusion centers. Mention “fusion center” and you’re likely to get one of two divergent reactions:

1. “Great idea – law enforcement agencies not combining forces and sharing data with each other to catch criminals wastes energy and taxpayer dollars.”
2. “This sounds like another step toward Big Brother government snooping around looking for some reason to harass private citizens.”

On the “great idea” side, we’ve seen editorial and popular support for fusion centers in Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, Tennessee, and other states. Strong federal support for state-based centers is also evident in recent announcements from the Department of Homeland Security. On the “Big Brother” side of the discussion, projects having ominous overtones like the National Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative have drawn attention and suspicion from privacy rights groups like the ACLU.

Take a case in point. In Austin TX the formation of an Austin Regional Intelligence Center was recently proposed. On the one hand, local law enforcement leaders are enthusiastic about the ability to “stitch together information collected by various agencies to create new files on suspects in criminal cases or on suspects they think may be planning to carry out crimes and merit further surveillance.”

On the other hand, privacy advocates express concern about the use of unchecked power and the establishment of clear policies for how private citizens will be protected from intrusive surveillance. “If you start to go above and beyond the lawful means of data information collection, we are well on our way down a slippery slope where there is no return,” said Chuck Young, founder and treasurer of the civil liberties group Texans for Accountable Government.

The City of Austin police have been diligent in addressing privacy concerns very directly. David Carter, the assistant police chief responsible for the project, said that “we do recognize that there are concerns in some people’s minds concerning fusion centers in general,” and the department has taken care to meet early with representatives of the ACLU and other concerned citizens to determine how best to achieve security objectives while protecting the privacy of individuals.

We believe a forum like IdentityResolutionDaily allows everyone to share views and information on this long-standing and complex issue and is the best way to enable open communication among all concerned parties. Let us hear from you.

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[Post from Infoglide] The Other Half of Entity Resolution

“In a recent post, Jonathan McDonald quotes one definition of entity resolution: ‘According to Gartner, entity resolution is ‘the capability to resolve multiple labels for individuals, products or other noun classes of data into a single resolved entity when pseudonyms, alias names or other synonym-style constructs exist.’ …While the definition nicely captures the value of ‘first degree’ entity resolution, it falls short by omitting non-obvious relationship detection.”

iHealthBeat: Study: U.S. Lags Behind Many Other Countries in EHR Use

“The study found that 46% of U.S. physicians use electronic health records, up from 28% in 2006. The researchers found that 99% of doctors in the Netherlands use EHRs. Australia, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the U.K. also reported EHR adoption rates of 94% or higher. “

data quality PRO: Profit by Data Quality Best Practices

“Insurers use data to manage litigation, detect fraudulent claims and limit financial exposure to claims through reinsurance, but this practice works only when the data is credible. It is no overstatement that sound, profitable property / casualty operations begin – and end – with quality data.”

Federal News Radio: What airline passengers need to know about TSA’s Secure Flight program

“The information is then used ‘behind the scenes’ to match against the No-Fly list. ‘It’s a behind the scenes process,’ said Leyh. ‘If you get to the airport and you have your boarding pass, the Secure Flight part of it, and the watch list matching part of it, is over. It’s done with.’”

information management: Inefficiency as a Standard in Product Information Management

“Managing product information across a large organization consists of much more than making sure prices and descriptions are accurate and consistent. Large manufacturers and retailers employ teams of people tasked with the job of cross checking product data. While the deployment of these teams is a good idea in theory, the process is loaded with inefficiency and errors are all but guaranteed.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Avoiding False Positives: Analytics or Humans?

“The European Union recently started a five-year research program in conjunction with its expanding role in fighting crime and terrorism. The purpose of Project Indect is to develop advanced analytics that help monitor human activity for ‘automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour and violence.’ Naturally, the project has drawn suspicion and criticism, both from those who oppose the growing power of the EU and from watchdog groups concerned about encroachments into privacy and civil liberty…”

SDTimes: Old thinking does a disservice to new data hubs

“The enterprise needs to be able to understand the origin, the time and possibly the reason for a change. These audit needs must be supported by the data hub at the attribute level. MDM solutions that maintain the golden record dynamically address this need by supporting the history of changes in the source systems record content.”

Accision Health Blog: Surveys Show Importance of EHR

“A new Rand study is one of the first to link the use of electronic health records in community-based medical practices with higher quality of care.  Rand Corporation researchers found in a study of 305 groups of primary care physicians that the routine use of multifunctional EHRs was more likely to be linked to higher quality care than other common strategies, such as structural changes used for improving care.”

NYSIF: Central NY Contractor Hit with Workers Comp Fraud Charges

“Investigators said Mr. Decker previously had an insurance policy with NYSIF when he operated RD Builders in November 2005, a policy cancelled for non-payment a few months later. In 2008, he applied to NYSIF’s Syracuse office for workers’ compensation insurance doing business as Bull Rock Development, Inc.”

public intelligence: Office of Intelligence and Analysis (DHS)

“These entities are unified under local fusion centers, which provide state and local officials with intelligence products while simultaneously gathering information for federal sources.  As of July 2009, there were 72 designated fusion centers around the country with 36 field representatives deployed. The Department has provided more than $254 million from FY 2004-2007 to state and local governments to support the centers.”

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By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior VP & Chief Marketing Officer

The European Union recently started a five-year research program in conjunction with its expanding role in fighting crime and terrorism. The purpose of Project Indect is to develop advanced analytics that help monitor human activity for “automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour and violence.”

Naturally, the project has drawn suspicion and criticism, both from those who oppose the growing power of the EU and from watchdog groups concerned about encroachments into privacy and civil liberty:

According to the Open Europe think tank, the increased emphasis on co-operation and sharing intelligence means that European police forces are likely to gain access to sensitive information held by UK police, including the British DNA database. It also expects the number of UK citizens extradited under the controversial European Arrest Warrant to triple. Stephen Booth, an Open Europe analyst who has helped compile a dossier on the European justice agenda, said these developments and projects such as Indect sounded “Orwellian” and raised serious questions about individual liberty.

Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty, a UK human rights group, said, “Profiling whole populations instead of monitoring individual suspects is a sinister step in any society. It’s dangerous enough at [the] national level, but on a Europe-wide scale the idea becomes positively chilling.”

At IdentityResolutionDaily, we’ve consistently supported open and civil discussion about balancing security requirements with individual rights of privacy and liberty (e.g. “Walking the Privacy/Security Tightrope“) . We’ve also dealt with the criticality of using analytic technology that minimizes false positives (e.g. “False Positives versus Citizen Profiles“).

Not long ago, James Taylor of Decision Management Solutions made an excellent point about whether using analytic technologies (e.g. identity resolution) versus relying totally on human judgment increases or decreases the risk of false positives:

Humans, unlike analytics, are prone to prejudices and personal biases. They judge people too much by how they look (stopping the Indian with a beard for instance) and not enough by behavior (stopping the white guy who is nervously fiddling with his shoes say)… If we bring analytics to bear on a problem the question should be does it eliminate more biases and bad decision making than it creates new false positives… Over and over again studies show analytics do better in this regard… I think analytics are ethically neutral and the risk of something going “to the dark side” is the risk that comes from the people involved, with or without analytics.

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

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By the Infoglide Team

revenueXL: Web based EMR - ASP vs. SaaS? Should you really care?

“SaaS applications differ from ASP applications in that SaaS solutions are developed specifically to leverage web technologies such as the browser, thereby making them web-native. The database design and architecture of SaaS applications are specifically built with ‘multi-tenancy’ in mind, thereby enabling multiple tenants (customers or users) to access a shared data model. An ASP application on the other hand in most cases is a typical Client-Server application (meant for a single client) that is accessed over the internet and therefore includes an independent instance of Database that is specifically meant for your medical office.”

The Data Asset: Closing the Loop: Selecting the Right Technology

“Data management tools include those for data profiling, data quality and identity resolution. Measures that need to be addressed include data standardization, pattern standardization, address verification, and adherence to business rules.”

Homeland Security: DHS Announces New Information-Sharing Tool to Help Fusion Centers Combat Terrorism

“State and major urban area fusion centers provide critical links for information sharing between and across all levels of government, and help fulfill key recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. This initiative will serve as a valuable resource to enhance situational awareness and support more timely and complete analysis of national security threats.”

ITBusinessEdge: Seven Data Integration Trends

“Master data management, which should be an enterprisewide endeavor, is being deployed for tactical purposes. The result? MDM projects support specific business needs and aren’t fully integrated across the enterprise.”

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