Reading How Africa WorksJoe Studwell

Studying Probabilistic record linkage Robin Linacre's write-up. The clearest account of Fellegi-Sunter I have found, and it is free. Apache Ossie The semantic interchange spec, formerly OSI. A common format for what a metric actually means, across tools. Synthetic data as a design problem Google's write-up on generating datasets from first principles rather than imitating a sample. Coverage, complexity and quality as separate dials.

Fact of the month

Entities do not exist in the information system. They exist in the real world. Information systems store references to entities, never the entities themselves. Sep 2026 · Something I keep coming back to. · all marginalia

Notes

Living pages. I revise these rather than replace them.

These are notes, not posts. They get edited as I learn more, so the date on each one is the date I last changed my mind about it.

Mostly about intelligence and the information underneath it. Knowledge graphs, semantic layers, information quality, retrieval. Some of them are questions I have not answered yet.

Alongside these there are paradoxes, which are the opposite kind of thing: settled, named, and worth remembering because I keep meeting the same shapes without recognising them.

11 entries

The generator is the dataset Four waves of where data came from. The fourth one does not remove the hard problem, it moves it somewhere nobody is looking. rev. 24 Sep 2026
The name a system remembers Canonicalization is not just tidying text. It is how an organisation records what a reference is meant to represent. rev. 13 Sep 2026
A category is a decision The same marketplace, address book, or neighbourhood can be grouped many ways. Somebody chose, for a purpose, and the purpose is still in there. rev. 9 Sep 2026
Similarity is not transitive Looking alike can help us find a group. It cannot tell us what the group is for. rev. 7 Sep 2026
Sameness and similarity Two records can look alike without referring to one thing. The small distinction that makes matching systems safer. rev. 3 Sep 2026
A place is not a point Place is the bridge for anything that has to arrive. Space, place, and the two ways of giving somewhere an identity. rev. 31 Aug 2026
What kind of thing are you resolving? The country is real. The strings are not. What that changes for entity resolution, and for systems trying to reason about the result. rev. 7 Sep 2026
Alignment starts with reference Before you align a system to human values, it has to know what it is talking about. rev. 13 Aug 2026
Human machine symbiosis, sixty years on Licklider split the work by what each side was good at. The split has quietly moved onto a different axis, and that changes what is safe to hand over. rev. 13 Sep 2026
What an agent should refuse to do Confidence, abstention, and why "I don't know" is an answer. rev. 5 Aug 2026
What entity resolution actually is Deciding whether two records are the same thing, in plain language. rev. 1 Aug 2026