As founder and chief scientist of Systems Research & Development (SRD), I spent over 20 years refining technology to determine when people are the same or related despite the natural (and sometime intentional) variability that occurs in identity data. My company and our Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness (NORA) technology were purchased by IBM in January of 2005 (we are now called IBM Entity Analytics).
When resolving identities, understanding when names are similar is critical. And it requires very sophisticated algorithms to handle global name issues like transliteration. For example, while Mohammed is represented one way in Arabic, it can be spelled over 100 ways when translated to English (e.g., Mohamed, Muhammad, Mohammad, etc.) – the shortest of which is Mhd.
And while SRD passionately worked on identity resolution over these many years, a company called Language Analysis Systems (LAS) has itself been passionately working for over 20 years on mastering global name resolution. Their leadership in this field has made them the de facto standard for global name analysis.
Well, this is a great day for IBM, and especially my Entity Analytics team, as we purchased LAS today!
What do you think happens when the best identity resolution technology on the planet meets the best name resolution technology on the planet? I will tell you this … I am very excited!
It is good to see that people at the devleopmental level and creation level are actually thinking about the implications to human rights and privacy. Recently, because I passed at the airport with an Arabic letter from a 'sister' in an organzation in Iraq, I wonder who's lists I'm on, considering it was taken without my knowledge. Who is correlating whom for what, and when, down the line. I agree with the comment that changing how societies feel about us, might be a better strategy to real protection, rather than simply connecting allot of dots, and there are allot of dots.
Posted by: Stephanie Heuer | March 19, 2006 at 10:18 PM
Your product is currently branded as DB2 Entity Analytic Solutions, even though it works with other data sources. Is there a plan to move this and LAS out of the DB2 brand into something more open such as WebSphere? I have done a lot of work with WebSphere II DataStage and QualityStage for fuzzy name matching. It would be great to also access Entity Analytics and LAS functions from the WebSphere II products.
Posted by: Vincent McBurney | March 21, 2006 at 03:19 PM