VIRGO: Virtual Identity Resolution on the Go

We present here the design, development and testing of an open-source software system supporting on-the-fly identity resolution, VIRGO: Virtual Identity Resolution on the Go. The system implements the open source Choice Maker algorithms and it was developed using a service oriented architecture (SOA) approach, which allows its use either as a standalone service or integrated in any SOA workflow. The system performance in our test case achieves the following merit figures, accuracy: 0.992, sensitivity: 0.981 and specificity: 0.992, and it shows linear scaling with the number of records considered. To demonstrate integration into a SOA framework we show how to incorporate VIRGO into the Open Further framework to perform record linkage when federating health records from multiple sources to identify cohorts for clinical research.