USING COMMERCIAL DATA INTEGRATION TECHNOLOGIES TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF ANONYMOUS ENTITY RESOLUTION IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR (Practice-Oriented) Methodologies

This paper describes a method for using new customer data integration and customer recognition technologies that have been developed in the private sector to solve the problem of anonymous entity resolution across multiple, non-shared data stores held in government agencies. In the method described, new commercial technologies that link records using anonymous tokens and encoded links allow indicative information across disparate data stores to participate in the entity resolution process without violating information-sharing policies. The benefit is that the resolution can be more complete and accurate through the broader inclusion of indicative data from many agencies and sources. The method also posits a trusted broker, an agent or agency that serves two primary functions. The first is to maintain the cross-reference table of encoded links for the participating agencies. The second is to translate the representation of the anonymous tokens presented by one agency into their corresponding representations in the other agency in those cases where information sharing is permissible and authorized. Although this paper describes the case where the entities are persons and locations, the same method is generally applicable to a broader range of entity types.