Entity resolution software for big data is a powerful tool to help businesses sort through complex, large data sets and organize that information in a coherent, usable manner. By leveraging entity resolution, organizations like yours can make connections faster and use those connections to drive better business decisions.
In other words, entity resolution software is essential in today’s workplace. By making sense of structured and unstructured data and providing an actionable set of uniquely identified entities, this type of data management software allows your business to gain better insights, understand your products and customers, and grow your market share.
What Is Entity Resolution?
Entity resolution is a process that brings clarity to ambiguous references to mentions of the same entity in different types of records and data stores. An entity might be a person, an organization, place, device, process – any real-world object that has a unique identity. Entity resolution organizes these data points by linking them together. Linking these disparate records provides data clarity and avoids data duplication. For example, a company may have multiple references to the same financial services institution in their system from logins, forms, and other inputs.
Another example of entity resolution is the process of mapping slight variations in address types or names to the same, unique location or person. So, if Franklin Jones is listed as “Frank Jones,” “Franklin R. Jones,” and “F.R. Jones” in three different records, entity resolution group and organize the three records under one unique identifier.
Entity Resolution’s Impact on Your Data
The amount of data available today is staggering. With cloud computing and in-memory computing, organizations today have the ability to collect and store vast quantities of information and use that data in real time. With the Internet of Things, all of our devices and objects will soon collect, store, and transmit data quickly and frequently.
The sheer volume of all this data makes entity resolution all the more crucial today. Entity resolution allows for co-mingled, cross-referenced, and duplicated data to be sorted rapidly, providing a coherent dataset to be used for analysis, business processes, customer service, and product development.
Entity resolution software for big data sets focuses on three core tasks:
- Deduplication: This is a data cleansing process where references to an entity are clustered together to remove redundant data.
- Identity Management: By using one set of deduplicated records as a master where each entity has a unique key, the records in other data sets referencing the same entity can be assigned the same key and easily matched. This is the principle behind master data management (MDM).
- Identity Resolution: Using a deduplicated reference table, “noisy” or incomplete records can be identified and labeled as known entities. Often this process is required to take place in real time, e.g. customer recognition at point-of-sale (POS).
Entity Resolution’s Impact on Your Business
Entity resolution software that is scalable can manage high volumes of data quickly. By applying customizable business logic rules to new data sets, search results, and existing data, entity resolution software can deliver automated, rapid results. By matching information in disparate databases, this kind of system can identity nonobvious connections between individuals that are critical to making decisions about your business strategy.
For retailers, banks, and insurance companies, matching applicants and customers to existing or new data sets is critical. With the right software, banks can detect subtle variations in applications for loans or credit cards to identify and prevent fraud. An applicant can be connected to a denied household member. An insurance claim witness may also be listed in a special investigations unit file or have repeated witnessing incidents.
In regulatory environments, entity resolution software can pinpoint connections to political leaders, money laundering, and identity theft. Fraud, abuse, and waste in government agencies can be targeted more rapidly, adding an extra layer of protection for consumers and businesses.
Our HiPER Solution
With Black Oak Analytics’ High Performance Entity Resolution (HiPER) system, your business can identify, connect, and use entity resolution in areas ranging from law enforcement and regulatory compliance to electronic health records management and data-driven marketing. HiPER retains matched data, reports where records are kept and if they are changed, and has a user-friendly interface that allows for customized comparative analysis.
To learn more about how to enhance your business with entity resolution software, contact Black Oak Analytics today at (877) 805-0736 or request a consultation to learn more about our HiPER platform.