Linking entities from different datasets is a crucial task for the success of modern businesses. However, aligning entities becomes challenging as common identifiers might be missing. Therefore, the process should rely on string-based attributes, such as names or addresses, thus harming precision in the matching. At the same time, powerful general-purpose record linkage tools require users to clean and pre-process the initial data, introducing a bottleneck in the success of the data integration activity and a burden on actual users. Furthermore, scalability has become a relevant issue in modern big data environments, where a lot of data flows daily from external sources. This work presents a novel record linkage tool, BeRTo, that addresses the problem of linking a specific type of data source, i.e., business registries, containing information about companies and corporations. While being domain-specific harms its usability in other contexts, it manages to reach a new frontier in terms of precision but also scalability, as it has been built on Spark. Integrating the pre-processing and cleaning steps in the same tool creates a user-friendly end-to-end pipeline that requires users only to input the raw data and set their preferred configuration, allowing to focus on recall or precision.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the research agendas of most scientific communities, resulting in an overwhelming production of research articles in a variety of domains, including medicine, virology, epidemiology, economy, psychology, and so on. Several open-access corpora and literature hubs were established; among them, the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) has systematically gathered scientific contributions for 2.5 years, by collecting and indexing over one million articles—this corpus, however, does not provide an easy-to-access overview of its content. Here, we present the CORD-19 Topic Visualizer (CORToViz), a method and associated visualization tool for inspecting the CORD-19 textual corpus of scientific abstracts. Our method is based upon a careful selection of up-to-date technologies (including large language models), resulting in an architecture for clustering articles along orthogonal dimensions and extraction techniques for temporal topic mining. Topic inspection is supported by an interactive dashboard, providing fast, one-click visualization of topic contents as word clouds and topic trends as time series, equipped with easy-to-drive statistical testing for analyzing the significance of topic emergence along arbitrarily selected time windows. Overall, our pipeline is very fast and its results match our expectations on topic identification (F1-score 0.854). The processes of data preparation and results visualization are completely general and virtually applicable to any corpus of textual documents—thus suited for effective adaptation to other contexts.