Bringing AI-Powered Entity Resolution to Government Data Standards

The partnership aims to improve accuracy and interoperability for information sharing across public sector agencies.

Senzing, a provider of real time AI entity resolution technology, has joined NIEMOpen as a sponsor, marking a significant step forward for data standardization and information sharing across government agencies and industry partners.

The Challenge: Connecting the Dots Across Fragmented Data

Government agencies face a persistent challenge: accurately identifying people and organizations across dozens of disparate systems, each with its own data formats and identification schemes. When a state law enforcement agency shares information with a federal partner, or when multiple counties collaborate on social services, a persistent and costly problem arises: records that look similar may refer to different, or possibly related, entities, while records that look different may refer to the same entity.

This isn’t just a technical problem—it’s a public safety, national security, and operational efficiency issue. Misidentified entities can mean missed threats, duplicated benefits, fraudulent claims, or wasted investigator time chasing false leads.

What Senzing Brings to the Table

Senzing SMARTER ENTITY RESOLUTION™ AI accurately matches and links records about people and organizations across disparate data sources. Senzing instantly reveals hidden connections between entities, even when the data is incomplete, inconsistent, or deliberately obfuscated. Unlike traditional matching systems that rely on exact matches or simple rules, Senzing entity resolution continuously learns and adapts in real time and self-corrects past assertions as new data is added.

SENZING© technology is already trusted by the largest financial services, healthcare organizations & government agencies, helping financial institutions combat money laundering, assisting law enforcement agencies in identifying criminal networks, and enabling government organizations to detect fraud.

Why NIEMOpen Matters

NIEMOpen is an open-source platform that creates consensus on data standards to facilitate seamless information sharing across domains. Operating under OASIS, the international standards development organization, NIEMOpen has harmonized over 20,000 data components serving 19 separate domains—from justice and emergency management to health and human services.

NIEMOpen is a common language for government data. When agencies adopt these standards, they can share information without building custom integrations for every new partnership. A “person” entity in one system can be understood by another system, dramatically improving interoperability and data quality.

A Natural Partnership

The sponsorship represents a convergence of complementary capabilities. NIEMOpen provides the standardized data structures; Senzing provides the intelligence to match entities accurately across those structures.

“Entity resolution across disparate data sources becomes dramatically simpler when the source data is harmonized by NIEMOpen,” said Jeff Jonas, CEO and founder of Senzing. Today, we’re excited to announce that Senzing will sponsor and publish open source data transformation libraries that allow developers to effortlessly map person and organization attributes, defined in NIEMOpen’s data model, into Senzing native JSON. With these connectors, organizations will instantly experience high-quality matching while maintaining the explainability, as required for government use.

Jonas, whom National Geographic dubbed “The Wizard of Big Data,” has spent decades pioneering entity resolution technology, including his work on techniques to help find connections between the 9/11 terrorists after the attacks.

Advancing the State of the Art

, welcomes the partnership: “NIEMOpen welcomes Senzing as a new sponsor and the contribution that Senzing will make to advancing the state of the art in automated information sharing with improved entity resolution.”

Wormeli noted that a significant portion of NIEMOpen’s data components define attributes about persons and organizations—precisely the information most critical for accurate entity matching across domains, whether for law enforcement investigations, emergency response coordination, or human services delivery.

What This Means for Government Agencies

For the hundreds of federal, state, and local agencies already using NIEMOpen standards, the involvement of Senzing could accelerate the adoption of entity-resolved graphs – a key ingredient in machine learning, AI and decision intelligence.

Senzing entity resolution is specifically designed to work in air-gapped environments, on-premises, or in the cloud—critical flexibility for government security requirements.

The timing is opportune. As agencies modernize legacy systems and seek to leverage AI for improved operations, the combination of standardized data structures and advanced entity resolution offers a practical path forward—one that doesn’t require ripping out existing systems.

Looking Ahead

Senzing joins other sponsors from federal, state, and local agencies and industry who support NIEMOpen’s continued development. The partnership comes as NIEMOpen prepares to unveil Version 6.0, a major new generation of the model and associated tools, on November 13th in a virtual meeting hosted by the IJIS Institute.

The collaboration signals a broader trend: the convergence of open data standards with AI-powered analytics to solve longstanding government information-sharing challenges. As Senzing contributes its entity resolution expertise to the NIEMOpen community, agencies may finally have the tools to answer that fundamental question with confidence: Are we talking about the same person?

Learn More

Version 6.0 of NIEMOpen, a major new generation of the model and associated tools, will be revealed on November 13^th in a virtual meeting hosted by the IJIS Institute.  Interested viewers can register here.