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

Identity

10 entries

The name a system remembers 13 September 2026
A category is a decision 9 September 2026
Similarity is not transitive 5 September 2026
Sameness and similarity 1 September 2026
A place is not a point 22 August 2026
What kind of thing are you resolving? 19 August 2026
Real Takes Time 17 August 2026
What entity resolution actually is 1 August 2026
Identity My New Problem Space 22 January 2026
Identity Is An Inference Problem 9 December 2025