How to force records together or apart

Overview

Sometimes despite records not having enough matching attributes to resolve together, you have additional knowledge and know records belong to the same person or organization. Senzing provides the ability to force such records together simply by utilizing the TRUSTED_ID feature. TRUSTED_ID will force together records that share the same TRUSTED_ID_TYPE and TRUSTED_ID_NUMBER attributes; regardless of the other data attributes in the records. 

Conversely, you can break an entity apart by giving different TRUSTED_ID_NUMBER attributes to the records the entity is comprised of. Forcing records apart isn't a common task. 

Usage

Consider the following two records:

DATA_SOURCE,RECORD_ID ,NAME_FULL    ,DATE_OF_BIRTH ,PHONE_NUMBER
TEST       ,1         ,SKIPPY JONES ,1960-01-01    ,5551212
TEST       ,2         ,BOB JONES    ,1960-01-01    ,5551212

Senzing would create two new entities for these records, detect they share the same date of birth and phone number, and record a relationship between the two entities. There isn't enough data at this time for Senzing to confirm they are the same person.

To force the two records together append the TRUSTED_ID_TYPE and TRUSTED_ID_NUMBER attributes to both records with the same values. The TRUSTED_ID_TYPE is an arbitrary value you choose, it can act as an informational hint when when reviewing the entity data. TRUSTED_ID_NUMBER is a unique value shared by the records. Records with the same TRUSTED_ID_TYPE and TRUSTED_ID_NUMBER will resolve together. Note, in the following example the TRUSTED_ID_NUMBER is created from the DATA_SOURCE and RECORD_ID values.

DATA_SOURCE,RECORD_ID,NAME_FULL,DATE_OF_BIRTH,PHONE_NUMBER,TRUSTED_ID_TYPE,TRUSTED_ID_NUMBER
TEST       ,1        ,SKIPPY   ,1960-01-01   ,5551212     ,FORCED_SAME    ,TEST1-TEST2 
TEST       ,2        ,BOB JONES,1960-01-01   ,5551212     ,FORCED_SAME    ,TEST1-TEST2 

Loading these two records would result in a single entity comprised of both of the records.

Tips

• Before using TRUSTED_ID check you don't have additional data attributes available that would allow Senzing to automatically make a decision to resolve the records together. In the source of the data are there additional names, maybe an address or identifiers such as drivers license or an SSN number? It is best practice to give Senzing more data to support it automatically making decisions rather than overriding its behavior.
  
  
• You can add the new attributes to the records by calling getRecord(), add the new attributes to the record, and then call replaceRecord() to replace it. Senzing will do the rest. WARNING: If you do this, you must ensure that no other thread or process is trying to modify that record at the same time.
  
  
• More than two records can share the same TRUSTED_ID attributes. In that case all the records that share the same values will resolve together.