The Rosetta Stone ?
I'd love to hear if others have encountered/addressed the issue of unversal entity identification successfully:;;;;;
We want to use external data sources in conjunction with our internal data in order to have a richer understanding of our customers
We have our own numbering scheme to identify our customers. Most external data sources have their own identifying elements.
1) We must analyze the identifiers of the external data source and find the correct match in our own internal system.
2) We must store this relationship in a way that will allow us to re-use it
3) We must periodically review the relationship to make sure that the identifier retains its meaning (e.g. the company presented by the external data source is still the same as the one we are identifying internally)
The Hypothesis
1) An extensible data structure could be developed to store the mapping between internal and external business entity identifiers in such a way that the maintenance of these relationships would be most efficient.
2) This structure could be made available to the public so that customers of these data sources could pool resources to keep the COMMON mappings up to date. ‘Common’ refers to all data sources except the internal data identifiers.
