CategoryValue
Available viahttp://dbpubs.stanford.edu/pub/2008-7
Previous version2005-5
Submitted on 17th of March 2008
Author Benjelloun, Omar; Garcia-Molina, Hector; Menestrina, David; Su, Qi; Whang, Steven Euijong; Widom, Jennifer
Title Swoosh: a generic approach to entity resolution
Date of publication March 2008
Published in The VLDB Journal
Citation Benjelloun, Omar; Garcia-Molina, Hector; Menestrina, David; Su, Qi; Whang, Steven Euijong; Widom, Jennifer. Swoosh: a generic approach to entity resolution, The VLDB Journal
Number of pages 22
Language English
Project Information Integration
Type Conference or Journal Paper
Subject group Data Integration and Mediation
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.
Keywords Entity resolution, Generic entity resolution, Data cleaning
Contact address Steven Whang
euijong@cs.stanford.edu
Department of Computer Science
Stanford University
Gates Hall 4A, Room 432
Stanford, CA 94305-9040 USA
Notes VLDB Journal (Online First) link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00778-008-0098-x
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