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Have you (or anyone else here) done that and succeeded at it? I can see why one would assume it could somehow be useful, but in the absence of someone accomplis
by andrewem 6y ago
Have you (or anyone else here) done that and succeeded at it? I can see why one would assume it could somehow be useful, but in the absence of someone accomplishing it I’m skeptical.
- 9dev 6y agoI'm actually doing that currently. We have a large database of company records compiled from different sources. Naturally, some of those records are duplicates. We have cleaned the data as much as it was possible using algorithmic approaches, but that only gets you so far. To go the last mile, we added widgets to the pages showing similar records where users may click "same company" or "other company". Poll results are aggregated and values above a certain threshold create an entry in a verification queue for our staff to look at. This works out surprisingly well for now.
- andrewem 6y agoI’m glad it’s working well for your use case, especially with the final expert evaluation. What it makes me think of is genealogy, part of which can be thought of as the process of assigning records (birth, marriage, death, census, etc) to entities (natural persons). These are complex determinations requiring understanding and correlating multiple records, and analyzing them in terms of information which is not explicit in the records (eg, knowing about relevant place names, name changes, etc). In the case of businesses, imagine trying to figure out the connection or lack of connection between the many Ray’s Pizza shops in New York City, as they open, close, and change names, locations, and owners over time.