The Four Generations Of Entity Resolution

Entity Resolution (ER) lies at the core of data integration and cleaning and, thus, a bulk of the research examines ways for improving its effectiveness and time efficiency. The initial ER methods primarily target Veracity in the context of structured (relational) data that are described by a schema of well-known quality and meaning. To achieve high effectiveness, they leverage schema, expert, and/or external knowledge. Part of these methods are extended to address Volume, processing large datasets through multi-core or massive parallelization approaches, such as the MapReduce paradigm. However, these early schema-based approaches are inapplicable to Web Data, which abound in voluminous, noisy, semi-structured, and highly heterogeneous information. To address the additional challenge of Variety, recent works on ER adopt a novel, loosely schema-aware functionality that emphasizes scalability and robustness to noise. Another line of present research focuses on the additional challenge of Velocity, aiming to process data collections of a continuously increasing volume. The latest works, though, take advantage of the significant breakthroughs in Deep Learning and Crowdsourcing, incorporating external knowledge to enhance the existing words to a significant extent. This synthesis lecture organizes ER methods into four generations based on the challenges posed by these four Vs. For each generation, we outline the corresponding ER workflow, discuss the state-of-the-art methods per workflow step, and present current research directions. The discussion of these methods takes into account a historical perspective, explaining the evolution of the methods over time along with their similarities and differences. The lecture also discusses the available ER tools and benchmark datasets that allow expert as well as novice users to make use of the available solutions.

Entity Resolution and Information Quality presents topics and definitions, and clarifies confusing terminologies regarding entity resolution and information quality. It takes a very wide view of IQ, including its six-domain framework and the skills formed by the International Association for Information and Data Quality {IAIDQ). The book includes chapters that cover the principles of entity resolution and the principles of Information Quality, in addition to their concepts and terminology. It also discusses the Fellegi-Sunter theory of record linkage, the Stanford Entity Resolution Framework, and the Algebraic Model for Entity Resolution, which are the major theoretical models that support Entity Resolution. In relation to this, the book briefly discusses entity-based data integration (EBDI) and its model, which serve as an extension of the Algebraic Model for Entity Resolution. There is also an explanation of how the three commercial ER systems operate and a description of the non-commercial open-source system known as OYSTER. The book concludes by discussing trends in entity resolution research and practice. Students taking IT courses and IT professionals will find this book invaluable. First authoritative reference explaining entity resolution and how to use it effectively Provides practical system design advice to help you get a competitive advantage Includes a companion site with synthetic customer data for applicatory exercises, and access to a Java-based Entity Resolution program.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 20th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2021, which took place in October 2021. Due to COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held virtually. The papers included in this volume deal with the latest advances in fundamental research, innovative technology, and applications of the Semantic Web, linked data, knowledge graphs, and knowledge processing on the Web. Papers are organized in a research track, resources and in-use track. The research track details theoretical, analytical and empirical aspects of the Semantic Web and its intersection with other disciplines. The resources track promotes the sharing of resources which support, enable or utilize semantic web research, including datasets, ontologies, software, and benchmarks. And finally, the in-use-track is dedicated to novel and significant research contributions addressing theoretical, analytical and empirical aspects of the Semantic Web and its intersection with other disciplines.

Chapters “No. 10 and No. 21” are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Applications, ISBRA 2023, held in Wrocław, Poland, during October 9–12, 2023. The 28 full papers and 16 short papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 89 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: reconciling inconsistent molecular structures from biochemical databases; radiology report generation via visual recalibration and context gating-aware; sequence-based nanobody-antigen binding prediction; and hist2Vec: kernel-based embeddings for biological sequence classification.

This book describes the results of activities undertaken to construct the CLARIN research infrastructure in the Low Countries, i.e., in the Netherlands and in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium). CLARIN is a European research infrastructure for humanities and social science researchers that work with natural language data. This book introduces the CLARIN infrastructure, describes various aspects of the technical implementation of the infrastructure, and introduces data, applications and software services created in the Low Countries for a wide variety of humanities disciplines. These enable researchers to accelerate their research activities and to base their conclusions on a much larger and richer empirical base than was possible before, thus providing a basis for carrying out groundbreaking research in which old questions can be investigated in new ways and new questions can be raised and investigated for the first time. Given CLARIN's focus on language data, linguistics and particularly syntax are prominently present. However, other humanities disciplines that work with natural language data such as history, literary studies, religion studies, media studies, political studies, and philosophy are represented as well. The book is a must read for humanities scholars and students who want to understand and use the potential that the Digital Humanities offer, as well as for computer scientists and developers of research infrastructures, in particular for researchers working on the CLARIN infrastructure in other countries.

Data matching (also known as record or data linkage, entity resolution, object identification, or field matching) is the task of identifying, matching and merging records that correspond to the same entities from several databases or even within one database. Based on research in various domains including applied statistics, health informatics, data mining, machine learning, artificial intelligence, database management, and digital libraries, significant advances have been achieved over the last decade in all aspects of the data matching process, especially on how to improve the accuracy of data matching, and its scalability to large databases. Peter Christen’s book is divided into three parts: Part I, “Overview”, introduces the subject by presenting several sample applications and their special challenges, as well as a general overview of a generic data matching process. Part II, “Steps of the Data Matching Process”, then details its main steps like pre-processing, indexing, field and record comparison, classification, and quality evaluation. Lastly, part III, “Further Topics”, deals with specific aspects like privacy, real-time matching, or matching unstructured data. Finally, it briefly describes the main features of many research and open source systems available today. By providing the reader with a broad range of data matching concepts and techniques and touching on all aspects of the data matching process, this book helps researchers as well as students specializing in data quality or data matching aspects to familiarize themselves with recent research advances and to identify open research challenges in the area of data matching. To this end, each chapter of the book includes a final section that provides pointers to further background and research material. Practitioners will better understand the current state of the art in data matching as well as the internal workings and limitations of current systems. Especially, they will learn that it is often not feasible to simply implement an existing off-the-shelf data matching system without substantial adaption and customization. Such practical considerations are discussed for each of the major steps in the data matching process.