IM InfoSphere Identity Insight, Version 8.0

Impersonal awareness

Impersonal awareness is a product feature that extends the traditional relationship resolution process to find and analyze impersonal relationships. The relationship detection process finds relationships between entities based on attribute values associated with those entities. Sometimes, it is important to find relationships between entities based on activities or other impersonal identifiers. These relationships between entities based on activities or other impersonal identifiers are referred to as impersonal relationships, and activities or impersonal identifiers that relate people are called relating facts.

Impersonal relationships always exist at two or more degrees of separation, because the relating fact is, itself, an entity. So to enable impersonal awareness and find impersonal relationships, configure your data sources to use the Degrees of Separation feature, which extends entity and relationship resolution to detect relationships at more than two degrees of separation.

For example, a telephone transaction contains data about telephone numbers - both the calling number and the receiving number. Even though a person placed the telephone call to another person, from the telephone transaction alone, no common data can be attributed to the persons. Often, the relating fact (the telephone call) is known before any other information about the related entities (the two people involved in the telephone call) is known. Since these relating facts cannot be attributed to a person, they must be represented as separate entities that are not people, but relate to people. However, impersonal awareness recognizes that a relationship between two persons exists as a consequence of the phone call.

UMF includes an entity type functionality, which allows you to define relating facts as entity types. Using this functionality, relating facts become separate entities in the entity database and can be used to detect relationships between Person entities. By configuring new entity types, specifying the appropriate entity type in UMF, and creating new resolution configurations, these relating facts may be used to automatically find impersonal relationships and conflicts between entities.

Entities of differing entity types never cross-resolve, even if the resolution rules allow it, and even if the data supports the resolution. This means that an entity type of Phone call never resolves to an entity type of Person .

The Visualizer graphs and reports impersonal relationships and any associated alerts, just as it does personal relationships and associated alerts.

Impersonal awareness example

For example, if you wanted to find impersonal relationships using telephone calls, you would create a new entity type of Phone call and adjust your acquisition node to correctly tag each telephone call record with the Phone call entity type.

When the telephone records are ingested into the system, standard entity and relationship resolution detects a one degree relationship between the Phone call entity and the calling entity (Person ). It also finds a one degree relationship between the person called and the Phone call entity. By itself, the system does not detect a relationship between the persons.

However, when Degrees of Separation is configured, it continues the analysis and detects the two degree impersonal relationship between the caller and person called. An impersonal relationship exists, based on the telephone numbers that are attributes of the Phone call entity type. Degrees of Separation then analyzes the impersonal relationship and generates an alert if a conflict is found.



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Last updated: 2011