Survivorship
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 survivorship means
Survivorship is the set of rules that picks a winning value, field by field, when the records in a cluster disagree. Sometimes called the merge or consolidation rules, it answers one narrow question over and over: given four values for one field from four records, which one goes in the golden record? The usual ingredients are source precedence (the register beats the CRM), recency (the newer observation beats the older), completeness (a full address beats a partial one) and confidence (a confirmed fact beats a single sighting).
The ordering of those ingredients is a policy decision with real consequences, and it should be published rather than inferred. Recency-first survivorship propagates a typo the moment it is entered. Precedence-first survivorship ignores a correct correction because it came from the wrong system. Most sensible schemes combine them, and all sensible schemes record which rule fired for each field so that a wrong value can be explained.
One subtlety that catches teams out: recency must be applied to the source's clock rather than to the ingest clock. A file loaded today full of values that were true in 2019 is not fresher than a register read last week, and a survivorship rule that reads the load timestamp will conclude that it is.
Entity Bind ranks source precedence first, then recency, then confidence, with per-field provenance recorded for each choice — and it skips the recency rule for the caller's own submitted facts specifically because their timestamps record ingest order rather than currency. Facts carrying a pass-through licence are dropped before assembly, not filtered afterwards.
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
- Register coverageThe registers the resolver reads, the licence each one publishes under, and how often a live entity's name is unique once it is tidied to a common form.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.
Golden record
A golden record is the single assembled view of an entity built by choosing one value per field from the records attached to it, ideally with the provenance of each choice carried alongside it.
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
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.
Last confirmed
Last confirmed is the most recent time a fact was observed still to hold, which is the freshness signal a golden record should rank on and a weaker claim than 'currently true'.
Licence tier
A licence tier is the classification carried by an individual fact that determines what may lawfully be done with it — stored, redistributed, resold, or only shown once to the caller who asked.
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.
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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