Auditing and Editing a Company's Identities

DotAlign has several ways of smartly deduplicating companies, and automatically detecting when new information should be assigned to an existing organization vs. when a separate one should be created. While this is useful, it can make mistakes or show surprising information. When you see something unexpected about a company's identity, DotAlign's auditing tools are useful to look at to verify the source and trustworthiness of surprising information.

Auditing Identities

To audit information about a company's identities:

  1. Go to the company identity auditing endpoint in Swagger (GET api/companies/{companyId}/identifiers) and click to try it out
  2. Enter both of the following parameters:
    1. Any valid companyId (also called an "identifier" or "identity"), e.g. name, domain URL, or relevant md5
    2. The number corresponding to the relevant team context (in most cases, this will be "1")
    3. The number of team members whose data contributions should be considered (in most cases, this number should match the number of members in the team so as to get all relevant information)
  3. Click "Execute". The API response will include information about each identifier associated with that company, as well as about each identifier pair ("tuple") involving those identities.

Some names and domains are not accepted as valid companyIds, i.e. are not treated as being representative of a real, unique company. For example, "gmail.com" is treated as a non-business domain and will therefore instead be listed as a "disqualifier", helping the application avoid associating everyone with a gmail address with Google.

The tuples indicate how each identifier is connected to the organizations's basket of identities, and are therefore most useful to examine when trying to verify the source and trustworthiness of surprising information. Each tuple consists of two identifiers (e.g. a company name and a simplified "distilled" version of that name), as well as the source of that link. Some tuples also include information about whether any data contributor has manually verified (or negated) that pair.

Editing Identities, Names, and Domains

Identity Edits

There are a number of edits you can make related to company identities:

  • Merge separate companies into a single record, as detailed here
  • Split a company into two or more entities, as detailed here
  • To add an identity that may be missing, submit it to the POST api/companies/requalify endpoint
  • To remove an identity and mark it as unsuitable to identify any company, submit it to the POST api/companies/disqualify endpoint. Examples may include:
    • Personal domains, such as "smithfamily.com"
    • Shared domains that may have been associated with different companies
    • Spam domains
    • Junk names, including company name typos

Name and Domain Edits

Any company might have multiple names and domains associated with it. DotAlign automatically determines what seems likely to be the best name and the best domain for the company, but you can override this.

To choose the name that should be used as the best name for the company, submit one of the existing names for the company to the POST api/companies/preferredname endpoint.

Similarly, to set the best domain URL for the company, submit one of the existing domains for the company to the POST api/companies/preferredurl endpoint.

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