This paper presents an entity recognition approach on documents recognized by OCR (Optical Character Recognition). The recognition is formulated as a task of matching entities in a database with their representations in a document. A pre-processing step of entity resolution is performed on the database to provide a better representation of the entities. For this, a statistical model based on re...

In February of 2004, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene completed the integration of its childhood immunization and blood lead test registry databases, each containing over 2 million children. A modular approach was used to build a separate integrated system, called Master Child Index, to include all children in both the immunization and lead test registries. The principa...

BACKGROUND Record linkage is commonly used in health research to fill data gaps. This study summarizes the linkage of the 2006 Census of Population (excluding Quebec) to hospital data from the Discharge Abstract Database (DAD). DATA AND METHODS Hierarchical deterministic exact matching was employed to link 2006 Census and DAD (2006/2007, 2007/2008 and 2008/2009) data, based on linkage keys de...

The correct identification of a patient's health record is the foundation of any safe patient record system. There is no building of a ;patient history', no sharing or integration of a patient's data without the retrieval and matching of existing records. Yet there can often be errors in this process and these may remain invisible until a safety incident occurs. This article presents the findin...

Data quality is crucial in all information systems. As a key step in obtaining clean data, record linkage or entity resolution (ER) groups database records by the underlying real world entities. In this paper we give practical motivating examples and review the available ER formal models. The formal model for matching and merging records determines not just the power and quality, but also the a...

INTRODUCTION In Australia, adult immunisation coverage is primarily monitored via periodic telephone surveys that rely on self-reported immunisation status. All Australian residents are eligible for Medicare, so we examined the feasibility of using immunisation-specific Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) item numbers to monitor and estimate adult influenza immunisation coverage. METHODS Baselin...

Record linkage, or exact matching, can be used to join together two files that contain information on the same individuals, but lack unique personal identification codes. The possibility of errors in linkage causes problems for estimating the relationships between variables on the two files. The effect is analogous to the impact of measurement error. A model of a linear regression relationship ...

The fossil record of crocodylians and their relatives (pseudosuchians) reveals a rich evolutionary history, prompting questions about causes of long-term decline to their present-day low biodiversity. We analyse climatic drivers of subsampled pseudosuchian biodiversity over their 250 million year history, using a comprehensive new data set. Biodiversity and environmental changes correlate stron...

Record linkage, or exact matching, can be used to join together two files that contain information on the same individuals, but lack unique personal identification codes. The possibility of errors in linkage causes problems for estimating the relationships between variables on the two files. The effect is analogous to the impact of measurement error. A model of a linear regression relationship ...

Coreference analysis, also known as record linkage or identity uncertainty, is a difficult and important problem in natural language processing, databases, citation matching and many other tasks. This paper introduces several discriminative, conditionalprobability models for coreference analysis, all examples of undirected graphical models. Unlike many historical approaches to coreference, the ...