Performing approximate data matching has always been an intriguing problem for both industry and academia. This task becomes even more challenging when the requirement of data privacy rises. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to address the problem of efficient privacy-preserving approximate record linkage. The secure framework we propose consists of two basic components. First, we uti...

Data Quality has many dimensions one of which is accuracy. Accuracy is usually compromised by errors accidentally or intensionally introduced in a database system. These errors result in inconsistent, incomplete, or erroneous data elements. For example, a small variation in the representation of a data object, produces a unique instantiation of the object being represented. In order to improve ...

Data Quality is defined in [TB9SJ as fitness for use, which implies that quality is relative to the use of data. Problems with data quality tend to fall into two categories: inconsistency among systems and inconsistency with reality. Format/syntax, semantic and value inconsistencies are representative of inconsistency among systems whereas incorrect and missing values are representative of inco...

In many database applications in telecommunication, environmental and health sciences, bioinformatics, physics, and econometrics, real-world data are uncertain and subjected to errors. These data are processed, transmitted and stored in large databases. We consider stochastic modelling for databases with uncertain data and for some basic database operations (for example, join, selection) with e...

We describe an open-source Java toolkit of methods for matching names and records. We summarize results obtained from using various string distance metrics on the task of matching entity names. These metrics include distance functions proposed by several different communities, such as edit-distance metrics, fast heuristic string comparators, token-based distance metrics, and hybrid methods. We ...

We solve the problem of record linkage between databases where record fields are mixed and permuted in different ways. The solution method uses a conditional random fields model to find matching terms in record pairs and uses matching terms in the duplicate detection process. Although records with permuted fields may have partly reordered terms, our method can still utilize local orders of term...

BACKGROUND Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems (HDSS) have been instrumental in advancing population and health research in low- and middle- income countries where vital registration systems are often weak. However, the utility of HDSS would be enhanced if their databases could be linked with those of local health facilities. We assess the feasibility of record linkage in rural South Af...