index.rst

Entity Service - v|release|

The Entity Service allows two organizations to carry out private record linkage --- finding matching records of entities between their respective datasets without disclosing personally identifiable information.

Overview

The Entity Service is based on the concept of Anonymous Linking Codes (ALC). These can be seen as bit-arrays representing an entity, with the property that the similarity of the bits of two ALCs reflect the similarity of the corresponding entities.

An anonymous linking code that has been shown to produce good results and is widely used in practice is the so called :ref:`*Cryptographic Longterm Key* <cryptographic-longterm-keys>`, or CLK for short.

Note

From now on, we will use CLK exclusively instead of ALC, as our reference implementation of the private record linkage process uses CLK as anonymous linking code. The Entity Service is however not limited to CLKs.

Schematical overview of the process of private record linkage using the Entity Service

Private record linkage - using the Entity Service - is a two stage process:

• First, each party locally computes the CLKs for their entities' data (e.g. using the clkhash tool). These CLKs are then uploaded to the service.
• The service then calculates the :ref:`similarity <comparing-clks>` between entities, using the probabilistic matching library anonlink. Depending on configuration, the output is returned as :ref:`a mapping, permutations and mask, or similarity scores <result-types>`.

API

Open API

Table Of Contents

.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 2

   tutorial/index
   concepts
   security
   deployment
   development
   benchmarking
   logging