CloudMatcher : A Cloud / Crowd Service for Entity Matching

Entity matching (EM) €nds disparate data instances that refer to the same real-world entity. EM is critical in health informatics, and will become even more so in the age of Big Data and data science. Many EM systems have been developed. In this paper, we €rst discuss why it is still very dicult for domain scientists to use such EM systems. We then describe CloudMatcher, a cloud/crowd service for EM that we have been building. CloudMatcher aims to be a fast, easy-to-use, scalable, and highly available EM service on the Web. We motivate CloudMatcher then describe its design and implementation. Next, we describe its deployment in the past six months, providing a detailed analysis of its performance over four representative datasets. Finally, we discuss lessons learned.