What is Entity Resolution?

Summary:

• Entity resolution is a process that identifies and matches records across multiple data sources to create a golden record of key business entities.
• It helps organizations overcome challenges with duplicate data, data integration, data quality, and regulatory compliance.
• Entity resolution is critical for modern data management, improving data quality, accuracy, and consistency.
• Resolving entities involves comparing attributes and features of records to determine the likelihood of them referring to the same entity.

In today's data-driven world, businesses are inundated with massive volumes of data from diverse sources. This data explosion makes it increasingly challenging to identify and reconcile duplicate or disparate records. Without a unified view of key entities such as customers, suppliers, healthcare providers, or patients, organizations struggle to deliver exceptional customer experiences, spot new revenue opportunities, or identify growth avenues. This is where entity resolution comes into play.

Entity resolution is the process of identifying and matching records across multiple data sources to create a golden record of key business entities. This process is critical for modern data management, enhancing data quality, accuracy, and consistency.

How Entity Resolution Works

Entity resolution involves comparing the attributes and features of records to determine if they refer to the same entity. This includes analyzing variations in names, addresses, and other attributes available for comparison. Traditional methods, such as manual processes and rules-based Master Data Management (MDM) solutions, fall short due to their time-consuming nature and lack of scalability. These approaches become increasingly complex over time, making them nearly impossible to maintain, much less improve.

The best approach leverages artificial intelligence (AI) combined with human refinement and reference data. AI detects hard-to-codify similarities in data at a speed and efficiency unmatched by manual or rules-based methods. Human expertise and reference data provide essential context, fix errors, and make judgment calls on ambiguous cases that an algorithm alone can’t figure out. This combination ensures the AI models and golden records are accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.

Why Entity Resolution Matters

Entity resolution provides a unified view of your data — ensuring you have a complete picture for decision-making and operational processes. Other benefits include:

1. Reduce Duplicate Records: Data entry errors and inconsistencies often lead to duplicate records, which can cost money and create inefficiencies. Entity resolution merges these redundant entities, improving data integrity and accuracy.
2. Improve Data Integration: Integrating records across various systems can be challenging due to different data capture methods. Entity resolution reconciles these differences, creating a unified comprehensive view that reduces time-to-insight.
3. Increase Data Quality: Inaccurate, inconsistent, and incomplete data hinders analysis and decision-making. Entity resolution improves data quality by surfacing all available information about an entity so the best value can be used for downstream analysis.
4. Boost Operational Efficiency: Powering business processes and engaging customers with an incomplete view of an entity is a surefire way to add friction to your customer experience and slow down operations. Entity resolution solves this problem by making complete, accurate data ubiquitous.
5. Support Compliance: Regulators expect you to know your customers and your data. Entity resolution ensures data meets regulatory standards by maintaining its accuracy and completeness.

Integrating Entity Resolution into Your Data Management Strategy

If your organization is looking to incorporate entity resolution into your data management practices, here are four things you should consider:

1. Agree on which entities are the most important for your business. For many organizations, customers are key. But for others, it may be patients, suppliers, products, or students.
2. Identify all the systems and sources where records for this entity could exist. Don't just think about software solutions. Also consider databases, third-party data files, and even Excel spreadsheets.
3. Determine the technology you will use to support your entity resolution processes. As mentioned above, the best solutions use AI to do the heavy lifting.
4. Appoint people to support the process and validate the results. Human refinement is critical to ensuring the accuracy of the resulting golden records.

Resolving key business entities is critical to delivering the high-quality data that powers analytics and decision-making. Done well, entity resolution will deliver AI-powered, human-refined golden records that businesses need to transform their business and reach new levels of success.

To dive deeper into the transformative power of entity resolution and how it can benefit your organization, download our comprehensive eBook, "The Data Integration Blueprint: How AI-Driven Entity Resolution Delivers Golden Records." Discover the strategies and technologies that leading organizations are using to turn their data into a powerful asset.