Identity Resolution Daily

By the Infoglide Team

Biz-Tech:Insurance fraud claims on the rise

“‘When someone commits insurance fraud they’re not just stealing from insurance companies,’ said Sanger. ‘They’re stealing from fellow customers.’ A recent study from the N.I.C.B. shows property/casualty insurance fraud costs Americans nearly $30 billion each year.”

PCWorld: Push For Electronic Medical Records Must Slow Down, For Security’s Sake

“‘I look forward to medical records going electronic,’ said Howard Schmidt, the former White House cybersecurity czar, ‘but I have a tremendous amount of concern about building a really, really good healthcare infrastructure… and then securing it later.’ Schmidt spoke with PCWorld at RSA 2009.”

IT-Director.com: A Bulldog Puppy Emerges

“Microsoft has moved further in its plans to introduce a master data management (MDM) capability into its product line. Microsoft had previously purchased Stratature, an MDM vendor known for its dimension management, and has used this as the basis for its MDM offering, previously known as Project Bulldog.”

Tampa Bay Online: TSA wants better picture of travelers

“With gender and birth information, the system, known as Secure Flight, will be better able to prevent misidentification of passengers who have names similar to individuals on the watch lists and better identify those who appear to pose a threat, the TSA said.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Entity Resolution vs. Entity Identification

“In entity resolution, as in any new research area, different authors or practitioners may use the same term but intend different meanings. You always have to be careful to understand exactly what a writer means when he or she uses a particular term.”

Ramon Chen: Shared Musings: Informatica acquires AddressDoctor GmbH - adds another MDM component

[Ramon Chen] “Outside of Informatica’s purchases, over the last few years there have been several purchases of supporting MDM products including IBM’s acquisition of Exeros, SAP buying Business Objects, who prior to that bought FirstLogic for $69M in 2006, IBM acquiring Ascential QualityStage and DataStage for $1.1B, D&B acquiring Purisma for $48M. This is a fast moving market and commodity components of the MDM lifecycle are being snapped up by the big boys faster than you can say Master D…”

Health Newstrack: Patients want computer consultations, electronic health record

“‘It seems that as the population ages and finds itself facing more illness and serious medical conditions, privacy of health information becomes much less important to patients than it is when they are healthy,’ she notes. ‘Patients are willing to trade some privacy in order to have records fully available in emergency settings and available to new caregivers as well as to multiple clinicians.’”

Information Week’s Analytics Blog: IT Fusion Centers

“The Fusion Center consolidates, analyzes, and distributes information through the many different organizations in order to enhance the ability to foresee and hopefully forestall terrorist activities. Many IT organizations are seeking to adopt the Fusion Center model as a means of obtaining a better overall view of their operations. They want to maximize resources and streamline operations just as their peers in the field of counterterrorism have done.”

Workers Comp Insider: Aging America: A Looming Catastrophe?

“The IAIABC Journal is published two times per year by the International Association of Industrial Accident Boards and Commissions (IAIABC), an association of government agencies that administer and regulate their jurisdiction’s workers’ compensation acts. It’s a peer-reviewed Journal, and one of a few remaining venues that publishes original research papers and in-depth treatment of workers compensation issues and opinions.”

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

In entity resolution, as in any new research area, different authors or practitioners may use the same term but intend different meanings. You always have to be careful to understand exactly what a writer means when he or she uses a particular term. For example, I have found that the terms “entity resolution”, “entity identification”, and “entity disambiguation” are often used with different meanings by different writers.

Over the years, I have developed my own definitions.  I don’t claim that these are standard definitions, but they are the way I use them in my own work.

First of all, entity resolution is the most general term that encompasses the other two.  Entity resolution (ER) is a process that covers everything from the extracting or collecting of entity references from sources, to linking references to same entity, to exploring networks of entity associations.  Having said that, I find there are generally two uses of the term entity resolution.  Just as we see the term information technology used in the sense of “Big IT” (anything to do with computers) and “Little IT” (a specific curriculum of computer studies), the same can be said for entity resolution.  Big ER is when entity resolution is used to describe the entire process from end-to-end (as in my definition above).  On the other hand, Little ER is when the same term is used to describe just the middle step, the logic of determining which references are to the same entities, i.e. “resolving” the references.

Whereas entity resolution is the process of resolving whether references are to the same entity or to different entities, entity identification describes the special case of entity resolution in which the references are linked to “known” entities, i.e. matching to a set of previously established identities (probably a better term for this than entity identification would be “entity recognition” as in “customer recognition”).  Thus, entity resolution and entity identification (or recognition) mean different things because it is possible to resolve two references without actually knowing the identity of the entities to which they refer.

A good analogy is in criminal investigation.  If two sets of fingerprints are found at a crime scene, it is possible to determine from their characteristics that they belong to two different suspects.  However, the identification of the suspects to whom the fingerprints belong depends upon the completeness of the fingerprint files (known identities).  This is also an example of what is meant by the third term, entity disambiguation, i.e. resolving that two references are to different entities.  In this example, we can resolve that the two references are to different entities without knowing their identities.  Another example might be two records with the name “John Smith” but with different dates of birth.  Without other information we may not know exactly which John Smith’s they are, but could conclude that they are different John Smiths.

Similarly, the same sets of fingerprints could be found at two different crime scenes, but again without the prints being on file.  This would be another case of entity resolution without entity identification, i.e. we know they belong to the same person, but just don’t know whose they are.  When this process is done intentionally, we call it anonymous entity resolution.  As an example, for privacy reasons we may give school records anonymous identifiers that allow us to collect and analyze all of the grades for the same student without revealing the identity of the student.

Entity extraction is another term that I see used to describe entirely different processes, but let’s save that discuss for next time.

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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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