LATTICEWORK™ Entity Resolution & Link Analysis
Decision Superiority™. LATTICEWORK is the resolution and link-analysis engine used inside MERIDIAN™ and also licensed as a standalone component where the customer already has an index, a case-management estate or a house view on presentation. Its purpose is plain enough: to decide, with declared uncertainty, whether two records describe the same person, vehicle, vessel, company, address or telephone, and then to show the analyst exactly why that decision was proposed.
The engine is probabilistic rather than doctrinal. It does not insist that one field must always dominate another, because real operational data are badly spelt, half-complete and often contradictory. A passport number may be authoritative until it is transposed; a date of birth may be persuasive until the source system records only month and year. LATTICEWORK weights each attribute, records the provenance of the assertion, publishes a confidence score for every proposed merge and emits a reason string in human-readable form so that clerical review is a judgement, not a guess.
Reason-string output cannot be disabled. It forms part of the product's evidential chain and is written for every proposed or accepted merge, whether LATTICEWORK is running inside MERIDIAN or under the standalone application programming interface.
Resolution workflow
- Normalise the incoming record into a common comparison form, preserving the source value unchanged for audit.
- Generate candidate pairs through blocking on selected keys, phonetic variants and date bands so that the improbable millions are never compared to one another.
- Score the surviving candidates across identity, contact, movement and corporate attributes, with penalties where fields conflict in ways known to matter.
- Publish either an automatic merge, an automatic non-match or a clerical review task according to the customer's threshold bands.
- Expand the accepted entity into its link neighbourhood, allowing one-hop association review, multi-hop path finding and watch-list propagation from the resolved node.
Public summary
MATCH 0.972 + surname exact: MARCHMONT + forename phonetic: AUBREY / AUBRY + date of birth exact: 14-09-1921 + address overlap: 12-14 FARRINGDON ROW EC1M 3JQ - passport conflict: final digit transposed DECISION: clerical review not required
The clerical review band is deliberately narrow. Most customers set two thresholds: below the lower band the pair is rejected without troubling the desk; above the upper band it is merged automatically; between them it is sent to a reviewer with the source excerpts, score breakdown and reason string already assembled. In practice this keeps the review queue stable and ensures that scarce analyst time is spent on genuinely ambiguous joins rather than on the merely voluminous ones.
Link analysis after the join
Resolution is only the first labour. Once an entity is established, LATTICEWORK expands outward by association rules chosen by the customer: shared address, shared device, common directorate, repeated vessel contact, overlapping travel document, or any other supported relation. The charting layer can follow direct hops for immediate context or compute shortest paths across the resolved graph where the question is not who knows whom, but how. The same machinery supports adverse-media correlation, handset community review and the slow unpicking of corporate nominees that were meant to remain discreet.
Because the product is supplied for defended estates, deployment is straightforward and unglamorous. LATTICEWORK is written in portable C with a documented Java API for integration into existing analyst workstations, batch services and message buses. It is routinely installed on air-gapped networks, accepts bulk load by staged file transfer, and has no dependency on a public network connection, licence callback or vendor-operated service of any kind.
Observed benchmark performance
| Measure | Observed result |
|---|---|
| Benchmark corpus | 2.4 million records deduplicated in 11 minutes on a 4-way Sun Fire |
| Precision at standard threshold | 99.18 per cent across the benchmark adjudication set |
| Recall at standard threshold | 96.74 per cent of known duplicate pairs resolved without manual intervention |
| Clerical review band | 3.62 per cent of candidate pairs routed to analyst review |
| False-merge rate | 0.08 per cent after threshold tuning and reviewer feedback |
| CPU scaling | 3.71 times faster from one processor set to four on the Sun Fire reference build |
Where a customer requires a fuller workstation, audit layer and source connectors, LATTICEWORK is delivered as the core engine inside MERIDIAN. Where the requirement is simply high-confidence resolution and graph expansion against an estate already accredited, it is licensed on its own with the same thresholds, reason strings and review discipline intact. The software is not theatrical about this distinction. It resolves the record, states the grounds, and leaves the rest to policy.
Capability enquiries may be submitted through Contact Us. Do not send classified data, sample operational extracts, personal records or removable media through this lowside website.
Page last updated 18 February 2003.
