Learn about Reltio's survivorship process, which dynamically determines an Operational Value (OV) for an attribute based on a selected rule type.

Reltio survivorship is a process to instantly get an Operational Value (OV) for the attribute based on the type of survivorship rule selected.

Reltio survivorship and merging are separate concepts and processes. Again, think of an entity as a container of crosswalks and their associated attributes and values. A merged entity is simply an aggregation of crosswalks from two or more entities. The additional crosswalks continue to bring their own attributes and values with them. If the acquiring (winning) entity already has the same attribute URI that the incoming entity is bringing, then the values from the attributes will accumulate within the attribute, yet the integrity of which crosswalk each value within the attribute came from is maintained for several purposes including the need to return the attribute and its values to the original entity it came from if an unmerge is requested. If the acquiring entity does not already have the same attribute URI that the incoming entity is bringing, then the new attribute URI becomes established within the entity.

Unlike other MDM systems, Reltio survivorship is a separate process that doesn’t occur during the merge. It is a process that executes in real-time only when the entity is being retrieved during an API call. Survivorship doesn’t care how the crosswalks and attributes came into the consolidated profile nor the order that they arrived. It processes each attribute according to the attribute’s defined survivorship rule, and produces an Operational Value (OV) for the attribute on the fly. Depending on the type of survivorship rule selected, there could be one or more OVs for an attribute. For example, you might choose the Aggregation rule for the address attribute for the purpose of returning all addresses a person is related to. Conversely you might choose the Frequency rule for First Name to return the one name that occurs most frequently in the First Name attribute. Note also that the role of the username making the API call also factors into the survivorship rule used. This feature allows one survivorship rule for an attribute to be stored with one username role, while another survivorship rule for the same attribute is stored with another username role. A fetch of the entity by each username role might return different OVs.