Yes. I work for Informatica on a data integration product -- taking streams of similar but somewhat different data and trying to determine the actual state of t

Yes. I work for Informatica on a data integration product -- taking streams of similar but somewhat different data and trying to determine the actual state of things. It's often used for merging customer lists, for example. We have found that determining the best value of truth from incomplete and sometimes conflicting data sources is one of these messy problems with no easy answers. It takes a lot of fiddling with match rules and considerable domain knowledge to get good results. Accordingly, our product is designed to be very flexible and configurable. I suspect improvements will come from making it easier for analysts to see a) the effects of proposed match rule changes and b) what decisions contributed to producing each output record under the current rules.