Entities, crosswalks, and golden records
Three concepts underpin everything else.
Entity
A single real-world thing the platform masters — a person, an organization, a place. An entity has a type, attributes, relationships, and history.
Source record and crosswalk
Each source system holds its own version of that thing. When one arrives, a crosswalk records the link: which system it came from, and that system's identifier for it.
Crosswalks are what make lineage answerable and merges reversible. Every value on a golden record traces back through one.
A crosswalk links a record to a source system. Mapping a code value —
one system's US to a canonical USA — is
transcoding, a different concept. Some
platforms use the word "crosswalk" for that second idea; this documentation
reserves it strictly for the first.
Golden record
The governed version: one value per attribute, chosen from every contributing source by survivorship rules.
The golden record is not a copy that replaces its sources. Contributing records remain, keep their crosswalks, and continue to update. The golden record is the governed view of them, recomputed as they change.
Some platforms use that term for the per-source contributor — the exact inverse of the common reading. This documentation never does. Here the survivor is the golden record, and its inputs are source records.
How a value is chosen
When sources disagree, a survivorship rule decides per attribute — the most recently updated value, the value from the highest-priority source, or every distinct value preserved where the attribute is genuinely multi-value.
The 360 view shows both the winner and the inputs, so a surprising value can always be traced to the system that supplied it.
Merged entities remain resolvable
When two entities merge, the absorbed one does not vanish. It becomes an alias: requesting it resolves to the survivor, and the response says so. Integrations holding an old identifier keep working, and the merge can be undone.
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Last verified against commit 952ed91b (2026-08-03)