Find and synchronize duplicate personal entries (duplicate synchronization)

Management -> Person administration -> Deduplication

Duplicate matching should always be carried out with the utmost care to ensure that only people who are clearly the same real person are merged. Incorrectly merged people can only be separated again with a great deal of effort and can lead to data protection issues.

How do duplicates arise?

For a variety of reasons, it may happen that multiple personal accounts for the same real person are created in Converia. We call these duplicates.

Duplicates primarily occur when personal accounts are created by third parties, e.g. when co-authors are created by submitters or group participants are created by group administrators. However, it can also happen that people create multiple personal accounts for themselves in Converia instead of using their existing account.

Converia automatically recognizes persons whose email address, last name and first name match to a very high degree and differ only in slightly different spellings (umlauts, accents, typos, etc.) and indexes these persons as duplicates in pairs.

When a person is created by a third party, Converia assigns an automatically generated login name. This consists of the email address plus an addition (usually _g or _x_g, where x is a number).

Filtering duplicates and searching for people

Fig. 1: Duplicate matching, filters and search options

• A) To limit the number of duplicates to be synchronized, you can restrict the synchronization to the current conference (initially).

• B) You can search for duplicates with specific personal names.

• C) Furthermore, the displayed duplicate pairs can be restricted to persons with certain roles in the system, depending on the project progress (e.g. only to reviewers, or to duplicates where one person is an attendee and the other person is a presenter).

Synchronize duplicates

Converia allows you to compare and merge these duplicates. To do this, Converia compares the personal data of both people and highlights all fields with different contents in orange in the results column. Fields with the same contents are displayed in green.

You can scroll through all duplicates from the current filter using the Next and Back buttons.

Fig. 2: Duplicate matching, personal data of a duplicate and scrolling

1. Is it the same real person?

Before merging a duplicate with a personal data record, it must first be ensured that it is really the same real person.

• Are the email addresses the same?

• Do the people have a common name? Caution!

• Is the institution/organization the same?

Particular caution is advised with persons who have different e-mail addresses, but also with persons who have similar or common names and different institutions. These could be different persons, and they must not be merged.

2. Doubts; different people

If there is any doubt that the two personal accounts belong to the same real person, the duplicate must not be merged. Please continue as follows

• D) Either save without matching (this will be suggested again the next time you run the program)

• E) or mark as not matchable (the pair of persons will no longer be listed as a duplicate)

  

  Fig. 3: Duplicate matching, matching decision

3. The same real person: merge the pair of people

If it is clear that it is the same real person, then both people may be reunited.

• F) To do this, use the > button to adopt a suitable value from both columns in all orange fields in the results column.

• G) Start duplicate matching = merge pairs of people

Tips – Which data to transfer?

• The registration date provides information about the currency of the data and we recommend giving preference to more recent data.

• When it comes to the login name, it is better to use the login names that the person has chosen for themselves rather than the automatically generated ones (_g).

• When it comes to email addresses, the data that the person has entered themselves should be used.

• When it comes to the address details, decide on the quality for a page (left/right) and take all the data from one page so that the address remains coherent overall.

During the duplicate matching, a new person is created that combines all the functions (postings, contributions, etc.) of the two original persons. The original subledger accounts are deleted, but their access data remains valid and leads to the new subledger account.

4. Aktivitäten beider Personen im gesamten System

At the bottom of the page, you will find a list of all bookings and posts made by the two people to be reconciled in the entire system. Here you can see the details of the interrelationships between the two people and assess the scope of the reconciliation.

Users only see the details from the conferences to which they themselves have access.

Fig. 4: Duplicate matching, postings and contributions of the two people in the entire system

Further information

• Backend users can only match duplicates from conferences for which they themselves have access rights. Duplicates of people from other conferences can only be matched by administrators. In this case, please contact Converia Support.

• If Converia does not automatically recognize two personal records of the same real person, duplicate pairs can also be created manually via the person details. Person details > Duplicates > Add duplicate