Author name: Roman Stepanenko

In brief, MDM is a process and set of tools for consolidating and managing an organization’s most critical (“master”) data. This data is then cleansed, enriched, and made available to authorized users in a consistent format. And it yields tremendous benefits for companies who implement it properly.

Entity resolution (also known as data matching, data linkage) is the process of identifying and disambiguating real-world entities such as people, places, organizations, and products in unstructured data. For example, teams may be keeping track of customers in different ways, using alternative spellings or abbreviations.

Software tools have been developed to automate the process of data matching. In this article, we’ll take a look at the available types of data matching tools, how they work, and some use cases for each.