Editing Record linkage (section)

== Naming conventions ==
"Record linkage" is the term used by statisticians, epidemiologists, and historians, among others, to describe the process of joining records from one data source with another that describe the same entity. However, many other terms are used for this process. Unfortunately, this profusion of terminology has led to few cross-references between these research communities.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://datamining.anu.edu.au/linkage.html |title=Cristen, P & T: Febrl - Freely extensible biomedical record linkage (Manual, release 0.3) p.9 |access-date=2006-04-21 |archive-date=2016-03-11 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160311044101/http://datamining.anu.edu.au/linkage.html |url-status=dead }}</ref><ref>
{{cite journal|last=Elmagarmid|first=Ahmed|author2=Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis|author3=Vassilios Verykios|date=January 2007|title=Duplicate Record Detection: A Survey|url=http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/ake/pub/TKDE-0240-0605-1.pdf|journal=IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering|volume=19|issue=1|pages=''pp.'' 1&ndash;16|doi=10.1109/tkde.2007.250581|s2cid=386036|access-date=2009-03-30}}
</ref>

[[computer science|Computer scientists]] often refer to it as "data matching" or as the "object identity problem". Commercial mail and database applications refer to it as "merge/purge processing" or "list washing". Other names used to describe the same concept include: "coreference/entity/identity/name/record resolution", "entity disambiguation/linking", "fuzzy matching", "duplicate detection", "deduplication", "record matching", "(reference) reconciliation", "object identification", "data/information integration" and "conflation".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Singla |first1=Parag |last2=Domingos |first2=Pedro |title=Sixth International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM'06) |chapter=Entity Resolution with Markov Logic |date=December 2006 |chapter-url=https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~pedrod/papers/icdm06.pdf |pages=572–582 |doi=10.1109/ICDM.2006.65 |isbn=9780769527024 |access-date=1 March 2023 |s2cid=12211870}}</ref>

While they share similar names, record linkage and [[Linked Data|linked data]] are two separate approaches to processing and structuring data.  Although both involve identifying matching entities across different data sets, record linkage standardly equates "entities" with human individuals; by contrast, Linked Data is based on the possibility of interlinking any [[web resource]] across data sets, using a correspondingly broader concept of identifier, namely a [[Uniform Resource Identifier|URI]].