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The Worked Example

The guides draw their examples from the record set below. The people are invented; nothing else is. The attribute names are the ones the shipped person model defines, the value shapes are the ones the platform stores, and the disagreements are the ones it was built to reconcile.

One person, six systems​

A retail bank holds the same customer in six places. No two records agree.

SystemGiven nameMiddleFamily name
CRMJon—Pemberton
ERPJonathan—Pemberton-Hayes
KYCJonathanStuartPemberton-Hayes
Mobile appJohnny—PEMBERTON
Loan originationJonathan—Pemberton Hayes
Credit bureauJ—Pemberton-Hayes

Six spellings of one name, and each is correct in its own system. The CRM holds what he calls himself. KYC holds what his passport says. The mobile app captured a nickname. The bureau abbreviates. Loan origination lost the hyphen to a form that would not accept one.

Only one field agrees everywhere:

date_of_birth   1979-08-22   (all six)

Where the evidence actually is​

The name is the noisiest field. The evidence lives elsewhere, and it is uneven.

CRMERPKYCMobileLoanBureau
date_of_birth●●●●●●
email●●●●●—
phone●● ●—●—●
address●●●—●—
middle_name——●———

Two things follow from that spread.

A phone number ties three systems together. +15553001001 appears in CRM as a mobile, in ERP as a mobile, and in the credit bureau record as a home number. The usage type disagrees; the number does not. ERP carries a second number, +15553009002, typed work.

Nobody holds a government identifier. There is no ssn on any of the six. That matters more than it looks: it removes the one shortcut that would settle this instantly, and forces the pair to be decided on accumulated evidence instead. Most real clusters are like this.

The address that looks like a conflict and is not​

Three systems hold an address, and two of them write the same street differently:

Systemaddress.line1address.postalCodeUsage type
CRM12 Old Mill Road06103home
ERP12 Old Mill Rd06103home
KYC12 Old Mill Road06103home
Loan origination440 Asylum Avenue06105mailing

Road and Rd are the same street. Standardization resolves that before anything is compared — and note the direction, because it is the opposite of what people expect: the platform expands abbreviations rather than contracting them, so both land on old mill road and converge.

The loan record is a genuinely different address, at a different postal code, and it is typed mailing rather than home. That is not a conflict to resolve — it is a second, true address that survivorship keeps alongside the first.

This is why usage type exists

Without it, 12 Old Mill Road and 440 Asylum Avenue look like two systems disagreeing about where he lives. With it, they are a home address and a mailing address, and both survive.

What this cluster exercises​

Each stage of the pipeline has something real to do with this record set:

StageWhat this cluster forces it to handle
StandardizePEMBERTON casing, Rd versus Road
Matchsix name spellings, no shared identifier
Reviewpairs that land between the thresholds
Survivorshipwhich name wins, and both addresses surviving
The 360 viewone record, with all six inputs still visible

Source records and crosswalks​

The six above are separate records because nothing has matched them yet. Once records are linked to one entity, the link is a crosswalk — the entity plus each system's own identifier for it.

A different fixture in the same pack shows the shape, for a customer already resolved across three systems:

System      Record type   Identifier in that system   Confidence   Primary
ERP         CUSTOMER      ERP-CUST-100001             100          yes
CRM         CONTACT       CRM-CON-A8K42P               95          no
MARKETING   LEAD          MK-LEAD-7842                 80          no

The same human is a customer in the ERP, a contact in the CRM, and a lead in marketing — three systems that do not even agree on what kind of thing he is. The crosswalk records that without forcing any of them to change.

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