Generic values describe data values that repeatedly occur in the
entity database and, as a result, are no longer used by the system to resolve
entities.
Data values are considered generic after they exceed a certain threshold.
The threshold is a configured maximum number of occurrences of entities in
the entity database that can share the data value.
Generic values are organized and configured by attribute and attribute
type. The generic data value of a specific attribute type will override the
generic data value of the parent attribute. Standard data elements whose values
can be considered generic are:
- Address
- Characteristic
- Email
- Name
- Number
Example
If the generic threshold for phone numbers
is set to 25, once a phone number value (like 555-555-5555 for example) is
the phone number value of more than 25 entities, from that time forward that
specific value is not used to resolve entities.
Note: When considering how high to set generic
thresholds, consider that setting a threshold too high might result in the
system performance eventually being overwhelmed by a flood of data that should
be generic. In contrast, setting a generic threshold too low might result
in important alerts not being generated because key criteria is considered
generic.