--- title: "Record" summary: "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." canonical_url: https://entitybind.com/glossary/record last_updated: 2026-10-15 copy: full --- # 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. Canonical page: https://entitybind.com/glossary/record Last updated: 2026-10-15 Glossary · Foundations ## How to read this 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](https://entitybind.com/glossary#foundations). By [James Rooney](https://entitybind.com/about), founder of Entity Bind · Last revised 15 October 2026 ## What record means A record is a row: a name, perhaps a number, perhaps an address, arriving from a CRM export, a supplier onboarding form, a register snapshot or an API call. It is an observation, not a truth. Two records of the same company will disagree about its address if one of them is eighteen months old, and neither is lying. Treating a record as an observation rather than as a fact is what makes the rest of the system tractable. Comparison operates on records; clustering groups records; survivorship reads across the records attached to an entity to assemble a single view; and provenance is possible only because each value can be traced back to the record and the source that supplied it. The shape a record arrives in is the single strongest predictor of whether it can be resolved, which is why Entity Bind publishes its rates per input shape rather than as one blended figure. A record carrying a company number or an LEI resolves at 100% (317/317) on the 317-company representative fixture of 2026-08-29, while a record whose name has been truncated by a field-length limit resolves at 58.10% (61/105) on the same instrument. Same engine, same day, two very different answers, and the difference is a property of your columns rather than of the resolver. Historical results on an internal UK fixture with a preloaded catalogue. The September 5 replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot establish current calibration. No independent customer holdout or global coverage claim. ## 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?](https://entitybind.com/guides/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. - [The API reference](https://entitybind.com/api): The REST surface: payloads, the decision outcomes, the error model, the usage block and the ceiling on the confidence field. - [How it works](https://entitybind.com/how-it-works): The seven-stage cascade in order, what each stage can settle on its own, and what it hands to the next. 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 free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) ## The terms next to this one Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one. - [Entity](https://entitybind.com/glossary/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. - [Cluster](https://entitybind.com/glossary/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. - [Normalisation](https://entitybind.com/glossary/normalisation): Normalisation rewrites a record into a comparable form — case, punctuation, legal forms, identifier shapes — before any comparison is attempted, and it is where most of the achievable accuracy in entity resolution is won or lost. - [Provenance](https://entitybind.com/glossary/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. - [Temporal facts](https://entitybind.com/glossary/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. ### Answered at length elsewhere - [Python](https://entitybind.com/integrations/python) (Integration): No package on the index and no generated SDK. The API is plain JSON over HTTPS with a bearer token, and thirty lines are what a wrapper would hold. ## 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. - [Entity resolution](https://entitybind.com/glossary/entity-resolution) - [Record linkage](https://entitybind.com/glossary/record-linkage) - [Deduplication](https://entitybind.com/glossary/deduplication) - [Entity](https://entitybind.com/glossary/entity) - [Cluster](https://entitybind.com/glossary/cluster) - [Golden record](https://entitybind.com/glossary/golden-record) - [Survivorship](https://entitybind.com/glossary/survivorship) - [Master data management (MDM)](https://entitybind.com/glossary/master-data-management) - [Reference data](https://entitybind.com/glossary/reference-data) Previous, alphabetically: [Recall@k](https://entitybind.com/glossary/recall-at-k) · Next, alphabetically: [Record linkage](https://entitybind.com/glossary/record-linkage) ## Evidence basis 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. [Start free](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) · [All 64 terms](https://entitybind.com/glossary) 300 credits. No card. For a guided review of your file, explore [the Merge Safety Sprint](https://entitybind.com/audit-pack). --- Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations only. It does not resolve people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions exposure, emissions or geolocation, and its results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. This is the Markdown copy of https://entitybind.com/glossary/record, assembled from the same data the page renders and carrying every sentence, table row, figure and question the page's main content carries. The HTML page is canonical; it adds the layout, the navigation and the interactive parts (the ask panel, the forms), which a copy can name but not run. Every page on the site, with a line on each: https://entitybind.com/llms.txt.