It has been a privilege to be a part of the UALR Information Quality Program and to work with so many talented students and gifted faculty members. I would especially like to acknowledge several of my current students for their contributions to this work. These include Fumiko Kobayashi, identity resolution models and confidence scores in Chapter 6; Cheng Chen, EIS visualization tools and confirmation assertions in Chapter 5 and Hadoop map/reduce in Chapter 10; Daniel Pullen, clerical review indicators in Chapter 5 and Hadoop map/reduce in Chapter 10; Pei Wang, blocking for scoring rules in Chapter 9, Hadoop map/reduce in Chapter 10, and the demonstration data, scripts, and exercises on the book’s website; Debanjan Mahata, EIIM for unstructured data in Chapter 1; Melody Penning, entity-based data integration in Chapter 1; and Reed Petty, IKB structure for HDFS in Chapter 10. In addition I would like to thank my former student Dr. Eric Nelson for introducing the null rule concept and for sharing his expertise in Hadoop map/reduce in Chapter 10. Special thanks go to Dr. Laura Sebastian-Coleman, Data Quality Leader at Cigna, and Joshua Johnson, UALR Technical Writing Program, for their help in editing and proofreading. Finally I want to thank my teaching assistants, Fumiko Kobayashi, Khizer Syed, Michael Greer, Pei Wang, and Daniel Pullen, and my administrative assistant, Nihal Erian, for giving me the extra time I needed to complete this work.

I would also like to take this opportunity to acknowledge several organizations that have supported my work for many years. Acxiom Corporation under Charles Morgan was one of the founders of the UALR IQ program and continues to support the program under Scott Howe, the current CEO, and Allison Nicholas, Director of College Recruiting and University Relations. I am grateful for my experience at Acxiom and the opportunity to learn about Big Data entity resolution in a distributed computing environment from Dr. Terry Talley and the many other world-class data experts who work there.

The Arkansas Research Center under the direction of Dr. Neal Gibson and Dr. Greg Holland were the first to support my work on the OYSTER open source entity resolution system. The Arkansas Department of Education – in particular former Assistant Commissioner Jim Boardman and his successor, Dr. Cody Decker, along with Arijit Sarkar in the IT Services Division – gave me the opportunity to build a student MDM system that implements the full CSRUD life cycle as described in this book.

The Translational Research Institute (TRI) at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences has given me and several of my students the opportunity for hands-on experience with MDM systems in the healthcare environment. I would like to thank Dr. William Hogan, the former Director of TRI for teaching me about referent tracking, and also Dr. Umit Topaloglu the current Director of Informatics at TRI who along with Dr. Mathias Brochhausen continues this collaboration.

Last but not least are my business partners at Black Oak Analytics. Our CEO, Rick McGraw, has been a trusted friend and business advisor for many years. Because of Rick and our COO, Jonathan Askins, what was only a vision has become a reality.