Entity reconciliation in big data sources: A systematic mapping study

The entity reconciliation (ER) problem aroused much interest as a research topic in today’s Big Dataera, full of big and open heterogeneous data sources. This problem poses when relevant information ona topic needs to be obtained using methods based on: (i) identifying records that represent the samereal world entity, and (ii) identifying those records that are similar but do not correspond to the samereal-world entity. ER is an operational intelligence process, whereby organizations can unify differentand heterogeneous data sources in order to relate possible matches of non-obvious entities. Besides, thecomplexity that the heterogeneity of data sources involves, the large number of records and differencesamong languages, for instance, must be added. This paper describes a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) ofjournal articles, conferences and workshops published from 2010 to 2017 to solve the problem describedbefore, first trying to understand the state-of-the-art, and then identifying any gaps in current research.Eleven digital libraries were analyzed following a systematic, semiautomatic and rigorous process thathas resulted in 61 primary studies. They represent a great variety of intelligent proposals that aim tosolve ER. The conclusion obtained is that most of the research is based on the operational phase asopposed to the design phase, and most studies have been tested on real-world data sources, where a lotof them are heterogeneous, but just a few apply to industry. There is a clear trend in research techniquesbased on clustering/blocking and graphs, although the level of automation of the proposals is hardly evermentioned in the research work.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2016-76956-C3-2-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED

A model-driven engineering approach for the uniquely identity reconciliation of heterogeneous data sources.

The objectives to be achieved with this Doctoral Thesis are: 1. Perform a study of the state of the art of the different existing solutions for the entity reconciliation of heterogeneous data sources, checking if they are being used in real environments. 2. Define and develop a Framework for designing the entity reconciliation models by a systematic way for the requirement, analysis and testing phases of a software methodology. For this purpose, this objective has been divided in three sub objectives: a. Define a set of activities, represented as a process which can be added to any software development methodology to carry out the activities related to the entity reconciliation in the requirement, analysis and testing phase of any software development life cycle. b. Define a metamodel that allows us to represent an abstract view of our model-based approach. c. Define a set of derivation mechanisms that allow to stablish the base for automate the testing of the solutions where the framework proposed in this doctoral thesis has been used. Considering that the process will be applied in the early stages of the development, it is possible to say that this proposal applies Early Testing. 3. Provide a support tool for the framework. The support tool will allow to a software engineer to define the analysis model of an entity reconciliation problem between different and heterogeneous data sources. The tool will be represented as a Domain Specific Language (DSL). 4. Evaluate the results obtained of the application of the proposal in a real-world case study