Swoosh: a generic approach to entity resolution by Benjelloun, Omar and Garcia-Molina, Hector and Menestrina, David and Su, Qi and Whang, Steven Euijong and Widom, Jennifer (2008) Swoosh: a generic approach to entity resolution. The VLDB Journal.
Do you remember Swoosh?
I saw it today in Five Short Links by Pete Warden.
Abstract:
We consider the Entity Resolution (ER) problem (also known as deduplication, or merge-purge), in which records determined to represent the same real-world entity are successively located and merged. We formalize the generic ER problem, treating the functions for comparing and merging records as black-boxes, which permits expressive and extensible ER solutions. We identify four important properties that, if satisfied by the match and merge functions, enable much more efficient ER algorithms. We develop three efficient ER algorithms: G-Swoosh for the case where the four properties do not hold, and R-Swoosh and F-Swoosh that exploit the 4 properties. F-Swoosh in addition assumes knowledge of the “features” ( e.g., attributes) used by the match function. We experimentally evaluate the algorithms using comparison shopping data from Yahoo! Shopping and hotel information data from Yahoo! Travel. We also show that R-Swoosh (and F-Swoosh) can be used even when the four match and merge properties do not hold, if an “approximate” result is acceptable.
It sounds familiar.
Running some bibliographic searches, looks like 100 references since 2011. That’s going to take a while! But it all looks like good stuff.