Understanding attribute types

Attributes can come in many attribute types. For example, a Person party's Address attribute can be more specifically defined as a Home Address, Secondary Residence, Business Address, Mailing Address, Temporary Residence, or something else. In this case, these attribute types are all Addresses comprised of the same set of attribute fields.

Depending on your business requirements, you can use attribute types to further refine the matching algorithms so that only like attribute types are compared to each other. For example, you can set the matching algorithm so that Primary Addresses are compared only to other Primary Addresses, Business Addresses are compared only to other Business Addresses, and so on.

Each attribute type is represented by a unique attribute code. Even if an attribute has only one attribute type, it still has its own unique attribute code.

A number of attribute types are specified in the data model by default, as shown in the preceding figure for the Person record, for example. These attributes are specified in the data model, but the default InfoSphere® MDM Probabilistic Matching Engine matching algorithms do not distinguish between attribute types. In other words, the default matching engine will compare any type of Address with any other type of Address without distinguishing between the types.

A party record can contain many attributes of the same attribute type. For example, a Person party can have many Primary Residences, Business Telephone Numbers, or even Dates of Birth.