Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Record linkage
Summary
Record linkage (also known as data matching, data linkage, entity resolution, and many other terms) is the task of finding records in a data set that refer to the same entity across different data sources (e.g., data files, books, websites, and databases). Record linkage is necessary when joining different data sets based on entities that may or may not share a common identifier (e.g., database key, URI, National identification number), which may be due to differences in record shape, storage location, or curator style or preference. A data set that has undergone RL-oriented reconciliation may be referred to as being cross-linked.
"Record linkage" is the term used by statisticians, epidemiologists, and historians, among others, to describe the process of joining records from one data source with another that describe the same entity. However, many other terms are used for this process. Unfortunately, this profusion of terminology has led to few cross-references between these research communities.
Computer scientists often refer to it as "data matching" or as the "object identity problem". Commercial mail and database applications refer to it as "merge/purge processing" or "list washing". Other names used to describe the same concept include: "coreference/entity/identity/name/record resolution", "entity disambiguation/linking", "fuzzy matching", "duplicate detection", "deduplication", "record matching", "(reference) reconciliation", "object identification", "data/information integration" and "conflation".
While they share similar names, record linkage and Linked Data are two separate approaches to processing and structuring data. Although both involve identifying matching entities across different data sets, record linkage standardly equates "entities" with human individuals; by contrast, Linked Data is based on the possibility of interlinking any web resource across data sets, using a correspondingly broader concept of identifier, namely a URI.
The initial idea of record linkage goes back to Halbert L.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.