From the webpage:
The German Record Linkage Center (GermanRLC) was established in 2011 to promote research on record linkage and to facilitate practical applications in Germany. The Center will provide several services related to record linkage applications as well as conduct research on central topics of the field. The services of the GermanRLC are open to all academic disciplines.
Wikipedia describes record linkage as:
Record linkage (RL) refers to the task of finding records in a data set that refer to the same entity across different data sources (e.g., data files, books, websites, databases). Record linkage is necessary when joining data sets based on entities that may or may not share a common identifier (e.g., database key, URI, National identification number), as may be the case due to differences in record shape, storage location, and/or curator style or preference. A data set that has undergone RL-oriented reconciliation may be referred to as being cross-linked. Record Linkage is called Data Linkage in many jurisdictions, but is the same process.
While very similar to topic maps, record linkage relies upon the creation of a common record for further processing, as opposed to pointing into an infoverse to identify subjects in their natural surroundings.
Another difference in practice is that the subjects (headers, fields, etc.) that contain subjects are not themselves treated as subjects with identity. That is to say that how a mapping from an original form was made to the target form is opaque to a subsequent researcher.
I first saw this in a tweet by Lars Marius Garshol.