Interactive Entity Resolution in Relational Data: A Visual Analytic Tool and Its Evaluation

Databases often contain uncertain and imprecise references to real-world entities. Entity resolution, which is the process of reconciling multiple references to underlying real-world entities, is an important data cleaning process required before accurate visualization or analysis of the data is possible. In many cases, in addition to noisy data describing entities, there is data describing the relationships among the entities. This relational data is important during the entity resolution process; it is useful both for the algorithms that determine likely database references to be resolved and for visual analytic tools that support the entity resolution process. In this paper, we introduce a novel user interface, D-Dupe, for interactive entity resolution in relational data. D-Dupe effectively combines relational entity resolution algorithms with a novel network visualization that enables users to make use of an entity's relational context for making resolution decisions. We descr...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TVCG
• Authors: Hyunmo Kang, Lise Getoor, Ben Shneiderman, Mustafa Bilgic, Louis Licamele
• Keywords: Entity Resolution, Entity Resolution Process, Relational Data, TVCG 2008