Entity Representation

An entity representation (ER) is a PII string that represents one or more entities such as a person, a place, a household, or an entity. For example, the ER string "mary robinson 3333 finley rd downers grove il 60515" represents a person, named Mary Robinson, who is associated with a particular postal address, 3333 Finley Rd. in Downers Grove, Illinois.

A given entity has many possible entity representations. For example, the same Mary Robinson referenced by the ER in the previous paragraph may also be represented by an ER such as "[email protected]."

The AbiliTec API supports ER strings as input for locating documents associated with a particular entity. For example, the ER string "mary robinson 3333 finley rd downers grove il 60515" can be used to find a person or household document about Mary Robinson, or a place document about the postal address in Illinois.

Calls to the Lookup enbdpoint using an ER as input only returns a document if the input ER has an exact match against an index key for a document. Approximate or fuzzy string matching within the ER string does not occur. While all fields in the construction of an ER are optional, the presence or absence of fields may affect the results returned from the API.

The following sections describe the rules for constructing ERs. First, the general construction rules are listed, and then the specific construction rules for different entity representations are described. Rules for constructing a hashed version of the ER, known as an ERL, can be found by < ? following the link to the ERL description- where is this? >.

Entity Representation Construction

General Construction Rules

• Strings must be UTF-8 encoded.
• If a field is empty, it is excluded from the ER string.
• Fields are separated by single spaces. Omitting fields does not introduce additional spaces. In the examples below, blank strings for middleName did not cause extra delimiters to be added into the resulting string.
• All fields must be converted to lowercase. Hyphens are acceptable in the ER string.
• Periods (.) must be removed from all name and address fields, but are allowed in email addresses.

Conventions used in this document to describe ER construction are listed below:

• Italics represent a field of an ER (for example, firstName).
• Spaces are delimiters in the ER string.
• Uppercase strings represent a previously defined string for ER construction (for example, PERSON_NAME is the ER string used to represent a person’s name).

Entity-Specific Construction Rules

Name Construction

Representation of this constructed name in the remainder of the document: PERSON_NAME

Address Construction

Representation of this constructed address in the remainder of the document: ADDRESS

Phone Number Construction
Phone number should be all digits with no special characters.

Representation of this constructed phone number in the remainder of the document: PHONE

Email Construction

Representation of this constructed email address in the remainder of the document: EMAIL

Name and Address (Postal)

Name and Phone

Name and Email