Entity resolution
The definition as the field writes it comes first, weaknesses and all. What Entity Bind does about it comes last, in its own paragraph, so you can take one without the other. Filed under foundations.
What the problem is called, and what the objects in it are. Entity, record, cluster, and the four industry names for the same job.
every figure, with its population →What entity resolution means
Entity resolution takes records that describe things — companies, in this product's case — and works out which of them describe the same thing. The input is usually messy: a name typed by a salesperson, a name from a supplier's invoice, a name from a register, three different addresses and no shared key. The output is a set of clusters, each cluster asserted to be one real entity, plus a record of why each assertion was made.
The job is normally decomposed into four stages: normalisation, so that comparable things are written comparably; candidate generation, so that every record is compared against a few plausible rivals rather than all of them; comparison and scoring, which turns a pair of records into a number or a verdict; and clustering, which turns pairwise verdicts into groups. A fifth stage — deciding what to do when the score is neither high nor low — is where most of the practical difficulty lives, and it is the stage vendors describe least.
The word is used interchangeably with record linkage and, loosely, with deduplication and identity resolution. The distinctions are real but small: record linkage classically joins two files, deduplication finds repeats within one, and entity resolution covers both plus the maintenance of a persistent entity that later records can attach to.
Entity Bind resolves company and organisation identity only. It does not resolve people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions exposure or emissions, and its results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals.
Where this shows up in Entity Bind
Three pages where this term stops being vocabulary and starts changing an answer, a payload or a price.
- What is entity resolution?Entity resolution decides which records in one or more datasets refer to the same real-world entity, and joins them under a single stable identifier.Open
- How it worksThe seven-stage cascade in order, what each stage can settle on its own, and what it hands to the next.Open
- The accuracy methodEvery published rate with the population it was measured over, its interval and its fixture — including the input shapes that fail.Open
The fastest way past a definition is a file: which of your rows are the same company, which of your existing matches we would not have made, and what we could not decide.
Start freeThe terms next to this one
Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one.
Record linkage
Record linkage is the classical statistical name for joining records that refer to the same entity across two or more files with no shared key.
Deduplication
Deduplication is entity resolution applied within a single dataset: finding the rows that are the same thing and deciding which of them may safely be collapsed.
Entity
An entity is the real-world thing a set of records is asserted to describe — in Entity Bind, one company or organisation, holding a stable identifier that survives the records attaching to it.
Record
A record is one observation of an entity from one source at one time — the unit that arrives, is compared and is attached, never the unit that is trusted on its own.
Cluster
A cluster is the set of records a resolver has decided belong to one entity, and the object that cluster-level metrics are scored against.
Abstention
An abstention is a first-class 'we do not know' returned instead of a match: the record comes back unresolved, with a ranked shortlist, a typed reason and the column that would have decided it.
- GuideEntity resolution vs record linkage: which term is rightRecord linkage, entity resolution, deduplication, entity matching, entity linking and identity resolution name overlapping problems from different fields. What each term means and when each one is correct.
- Use caseMaster data managementAn independent admission policy beside the platform you already run.
The other 9 terms on this shelf
What the problem is called, and what the objects in it are. Entity, record, cluster, and the four industry names for the same job.
Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy.
Start with your own company records.
Create your workspace, verify your email and run your first company file. The Free plan needs no card. Create API keys in your workspace when you need an integration.
300 credits. No card.
For a guided review of your file, explore the Merge Safety Sprint →