{"id":18294,"date":"2020-05-08T09:23:42","date_gmt":"2020-05-08T15:23:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fullcontact.com\/?p=18294"},"modified":"2025-01-06T04:29:57","modified_gmt":"2025-01-06T11:29:57","slug":"resolve-building-the-identity-resolution-engine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fullcontact.com\/blog\/engineering\/resolve-building-the-identity-resolution-engine\/","title":{"rendered":"Resolve: Building the Identity Resolution Engine"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following is the start of a multi-part series offering a glimpse of the behind-the-scenes advancements we achieved to deliver our Resolve API. The series, while technical in nature, will span from security to performant APIs, but by staying at a high level caters more towards the technical and product leaders. The series will tee up some deeper dives for future posts written by our engineers and hence more technical in nature for the salivating engineer. I hope you enjoy reading about our journey as we strive to become the recognized leader in Identity Resolution.<\/span><\/p>\n

Part 1: Birth of an Identity Graph<\/h2>\n

When we first started FullContact, our mission was to solve the world\u2019s Contact Problem by providing the \u201cone-stop-shop\u201d for personalized contact management. We wanted to make the Rolodex obsolete. This new world needed a digitized Address Book to simplify the portability and accessibility of the people in our daily lives. FullContact created a tool that allowed me as a consumer to connect to all the platforms where I had connections to people and load them into a single view.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The first major challenge we faced was how to reconcile all the duplicated people in our own address books. There really wasn\u2019t one true and holistic representation of my friends and family when I connected my Gmail, phone, Twitter, and whatever other social platforms I used. Each person came in as a partial view of their identity — my iPhone provided names and phone numbers; my social accounts provided names, usernames, and sometimes photos; my work Gmail showed a view into my business contacts — providing emails, names and company information, and it goes on. Not only did we have fragmented views of a person, but the data wasn\u2019t always clean or consistent. Personalized names, nicknames, and manually entered details easily confused our systems that were meant to organize the data. It quickly became clear that there was a need for something more robust and sophisticated than our basic \u2018exact\/fuzzy matching\u2019 logic.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As we embarked on creating a feature called \u201cDe-deduplication\u201d to reign in the chaos of messy contacts, we serendipitously gave birth to our Identity Graph<\/a> which would go on to become FullContact\u2019s <\/span>patented cornerstone<\/span>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Nine years later, our journey has led us to a place where our Identity Resolution<\/a> capabilities differentiate us from the competition. <\/span><\/p>\n

The Identity Graph:<\/span><\/p>\n