Synonyms
Entity matching; Object deduplication; Record linkage; Reference reconciliation
Definition
Let \( \mathcal {E} \) denote a set of entities in a domain, described using a set of attributes \( {\mathcal {A}} \). Each entity \( E \in {\mathcal {E}} \) is associated with zero, one, or more values for each attribute \( A \in {\mathcal {A}} \). For each entity in \( {\mathcal {E}} \), there can be a set of records \( \mathcal {R} \), provided by one or more sources over the attributes \( {\mathcal {A}} \), where each record provides at most one value for an attribute. We consider atomic values (string, number, date, time, etc.) as attribute values, and allow multiple representations of the same value, as well as erroneous values, in records. Entity resolution takes as input the records provided by the sources and decides which records refer to the same entity; in particular, it computes a partitioning \( {\mathcal {P}} \) of \( {\mathcal {R}} \), such that records in each partition...
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Dong, X.L., Srivastava, D. (2018). Entity Resolution. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_2547
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_2547
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