Golden record
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 golden record means
A golden record is one assembled view of a company, built by choosing a single value for each field from the records attached to it. It is also called the master record, the single view or the survivor, and the rules that make each choice are called survivorship. The work those rules do is real: once a cluster exists, something has to decide what the company's address is, given four candidate addresses from four sources of different ages and different authority.
A golden record without provenance is a liability rather than an asset. If the assembled address cannot be traced to the source and date it came from, then nobody downstream can assess it, contest it or correct it, and the record's confidence is inherited by everything that reads it without any of the evidence that would justify that confidence. Per-field provenance is not a nice-to-have on a golden record; it is what distinguishes one from a guess with good typography.
Two further properties matter in practice. The golden record must be reproducible — running survivorship again over the same facts must give the same answer — and it must be revisable, because the choice that was right last quarter is wrong once a newer confirmed fact arrives.
Entity Bind assembles golden records with per-field provenance and freshness, ranks by source precedence, then recency, then confidence, and drops pass-through material before assembly rather than after, so a fact that may not be warehoused never reaches the assembled view in the first place.
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.
- Survivorship and golden recordsOnce records have been joined to an entity, something has to decide what the entity's address, name and phone number actually are, because the joined records disagree.Open
- Master data managementGolden records, deciding which value wins when two records merge, and what a durable entity id has to outlive.Open
- The API referenceThe REST surface: payloads, the decision outcomes, the error model, the usage block and the ceiling on the confidence field.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.
Survivorship
Survivorship is the set of rules that picks which value wins, field by field, when the records in a cluster disagree.
Provenance
Provenance is the record of where each individual value came from — which source, retrieved when, effective when — attached to the value itself rather than to the dataset as a whole.
Pass-through data
Pass-through data is material a system may return to the caller who asked for it but may never retain — the tier where the difference between showing and storing is contractual rather than stylistic.
Master data management (MDM)
Master data management is the organisational discipline and the platform category that maintains authoritative shared records for core business objects such as customers, suppliers and products.
Temporal facts
A temporal fact is a value stored with the period over which it was true and the history of when it was observed, rather than as a single current value that silently overwrites its predecessor.
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.
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.
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