Entisointien

Entisointien is a term used in Finnish information science and digital humanities to refer to the process of converting data items into structured entities within an information system. The singular form entisointi is derived from entiteetti, meaning entity, and the suffix -sointi, which indicates a process or operation.

The entisointien process typically includes identifying candidates for entities across datasets, defining canonical attributes, performing disambiguation of mentions (entity resolution), linking entities to external identifiers, and enriching them with metadata. It is applied in contexts such as knowledge graphs, metadata schemas, library and archival workflows, and data integration projects.

The term is not uniformly standardized and appears mainly in niche Finnish literature and industry reports, often within projects that aim to modernize or interlink data. Related concepts include entity extraction, entity linking, entity normalization, ontology alignment, and knowledge graph construction.

Key considerations in entisointien work include data quality and governance, provenance, privacy, multilingual contexts, and scalability. An example is the digitization and modeling of a museum collection, where items, creators, places, and events are entisoint to form a network of entities connected by relations such as created, located, or exhibited.

See also: knowledge graph, ontology, metadata, data integration, entity-relationship model.