Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

October 28, 2011

Factual Resolve

Factual Resolve

Factual has a new API – Resolve:

From the post:

The Internet is awash with data. Where ten years ago developers had difficulty finding data to power applications, today’s difficulty lies in making sense of its abundance, identifying signal amidst the noise, and understanding its contextual relevance. To address these problems Factual is today launching Resolve — an entity resolution API that makes partial records complete, matches one entity against another, and assists in de-duping and normalizing datasets.

The idea behind Resolve is very straightforward: you tell us what you know about an entity, and we, in turn, tell you everything we know about it. Because data is so commonly fractured and heterogeneous, we accept fragments of an entity and return the matching entity in its entirety. Resolve allows you to do a number of things that will make your data engineering tasks easier:

  • enrich records by populating missing attributes, including category, lat/long, and address
  • de-dupe your own place database
  • convert multiple daily deal and coupon feeds into a single normalized, georeferenced feed
  • identify entities unequivocally by their attributes

For example: you may be integrating data from an app that provides only the name of a place and an imprecise location. Pass what you know to Factual Resolve via a GET request, with the attributes included as JSON-encoded key/value pairs:

I particularly like the line:

identify entities unequivocally by their attributes

I don’t know about the “unequivocally” part but the rest of it rings true. At least in my experience.

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