Individual Level
This will find matches at an individual level e.g. John Smith and Mary Smith living at the same address will not be matched, nor will John Smith and James Smith. However, John Smith and Mr J E Smith will be matched and (by default) John Smith and E J Smith will be regarded as a possible match, as perhaps E J Smith is known by his middle name.
Family Level
This finds matches on surname at the same address e.g. John and Mary Smith at the same address will be matched, as will John Smith and James Smith, and all but one record will be flagged.
Household Level
This matches records with the same address, regardless of surname e.g. John Smith and Lucy Jones living at the same address will be matched.
Business Level
This level is used to produce one record per company or business. Therefore, two different employees working for the same company will be matched, as long as the addresses and postcodes match well enough.
The final scores are obtained when scoring is run with the processed level(s), producing matching results.
Here there are also five levels – individual, family, household, business, and custom – each of which contains five score components – name, organization, address, postal code, and total. Total is the sum of the other four components, and is a value ranging from 0 to a maximum; this maximum possible matching score is the sum of four weights.
For example, the default US matching weights for IndividualLevel are 60, 0, 40, and 30 (name, organization, address, and postal code respectively), so the maximum possible matching score for Individual Level is therefore 130. NB: for US zip codes, the postal code score is restricted by design to a Likely match even if identical, unless the zip codes include the “Plus 4” element and are identical. For UK data, the weights are the same as for US data except for address, where the maximum score is set to 30 – this is because UK postcodes are usually full postcodes which are at a much lower level than a US zip code, making them worth more in relation to the other components of the data. So, the maximum possible matching score for Individual Level for UK data using the default weights is therefore 120.