Developing and Refining Matching Rules for Entity Resolution

This paper describes a process for developing and refining matching rules for Entity Resolution. The process is an iterative scheme that has two phases. The first phase tries to identify the primary entity identity attributes and baseline matching rules. The second phase consists of identifying and incrementally augmenting the baseline rules with supporting attributes in a way that incrementally reduces the number of false positive and false negative resolutions and ultimately brings the resolution results closer to the truth. The process design was implemented in the open source entity resolution system named OYSTER.