Data Matching – Entity Identification, Resolution & Linkage

Data matching is the task of identifying, matching, and merging records that correspond to the same entities from several source systems. The entities under consideration most commonly refer to people, places, publications or citations, consumer products, or businesses. Besides data matching, the names most prominently used are record or data linkage, entity resolution, object identification, or field matching. A major challenge in data matching is the lack of common entity identifiers across different source systems to be matched. As a result of this, the matching needs to be conducted using attributes that contain partially identifying information, such as names, addresses, or dates of birth.