The Four Generations of Entity Resolution

George Papadakis is a research fellow at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. He also worked at the NCSR ""Demokritos,"" National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), L3S Research Center, and "Athena" Research Center. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Hanover and a Diploma in Electrical Computer Engineering from NTUA. His research interest focuses on web data mining.Ekaterini Ioannou is an Assistant Professor at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. Prior, she worked as an Assistant Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, as a Lecturer at the Open University of Cyprus, an adjunct faculty at EPFL in Switzerland, a research collaborator at the Technical University of Crete, and as an Independent Expert for the European Commission. Her research focuses on information integration with an emphasis on the challenges of man aging data with uncertainties, heterogeneity or correlations, and, more recently, on achieving a deeper integration of information extraction tasks within databases, and on efficiently retrieving analytics over graphs/hypergraphs with evolving data.Emanouil Thanos is a Ph.D. candidate at CODeS research group of KU Leuven, under the supervision of Prof. Greet Vanden Berghe. He holds a Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens and a joint Master in Com putational Logic from TU Dresden, FU Bolzano, and UN Lisbon. He has also worked as a research associate at National ICT Australia and the University of Athens. His research inter ests focus on combinatorial optimization and operations research.Themis Palpanas is Senior Member of the French University Institute (IUF), and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Paris (France) where he is director of the Data Intel ligence Institute of Paris (diiP), and of the Data Intensive and Knowledge Oriented Systems (diNo) group. He is the author of two French patents and nine U.S. patents, three of which have been implemented in world-leading commercial data management products. He is the recipient of three Best Paper awards and the IBM Shared University Research (SUR) Award. He is currently serving in the Board of Trustees for the Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) Endowment, as Editor in Chief for BDR Journal, Editorial Advisory Board member for IS Journal, and in the Senior Program Committee of SIGMOD 2021.

Preface.- Acknowledgments.- Entity Resolution: Past, Present, and Yet-to-Come.- Preliminaries.- Generation 1: Addressing Veracity.- Generation 2: Also Addressing Volume.- Generation 3: Also Addressing Variety.- Generation 4: Also Addressing Velocity.- Leveraging External Knowledge.- Resources for Entity Resolution.- Possible Directions for Future Work.- Bibliography.- Authors' Biographies.