The Math, Myth & Magic: An Introduction to Identity Search-and-Match

 A Book Authored by Informatica

One of the greatest challenges organizations face when trying to gain a strategic advantage from information is dealing with identity data: the information that specifically and accurately identifies a client, a prospect, a supplier, a taxpayer, a criminal suspect, a product.

That’s because the words we use to label things are chosen from a very different vocabulary than meaningful language. There are no dictionaries, spell checkers or rules for the names of people, places, things or even addresses. As a result, identity data are subject to a wide variety of unavoidable error and variation.

Today, that’s not just a data management problem, that’s a business management problem – especially if you’re trying to build a 360-degree view of your customer or meeting evolving privacy, security and governance requirements.

Complicating matters even more is the increasingly global nature of business. Most large identity databases now contain data from multiple languages, countries and cultures which often have different structures, follow different parsing rules, and have different variation characteristics. Also, if transliteration, Romanization, character set conversions and other such transformations are employed, a new class of error and variation is introduced.

Any solution to this unique data management problem must be able to deal with the full range of identity information, compensate for errors and variation, and quickly and accurately find the connections hidden in the data.

This informative and educational book shows how identity resolution technology can help you deal with more than 60 issues in order to manage identity data successfully. It includes chapters on:

• What Naming Data do we use to Search with?
• What Identification Data do we use to Match with?
• What Objectives do we have to satisfy in Name Search and Matching systems?
• The Types of Error and Variation
• Popular (but not so hot) Techniques
• File and Field Design Issues
• Performance and Quality Issues
• Parsing, Standardization & Cleaning
• Multinational Systems
• Customer Identification Systems
• Marketing Systems
• Fraud & Intelligence Systems
• Fundamental Characteristics and Components of Strong Name Search and Matching Systems
• Philosophy and Convictions about Name Search and Matching

This book will help you determine whether identity resolution technology can help you cope with your evolving data management challenges.

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