Issue: in case an equally named person exist in the system, but without a match on email address, the system suggests the existing profile as initial selection. This is often wrong. Multiple cases of selecting this wrong profile occurred for ASE 2019, especially for Chinese persons (where names are less unique).

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The solution I am thinking of is to only pre-select an existing profile when there is an exact email address match (as Eelco suggests).
Else, add the identity as new person, except when an existing profile matches the name and its affiliation is similar enough (as Julia suggests).

Adding support for easy identity-merge is already work-in-progress, and is definitely important when duplication of profiles is more likely to happen.

Maybe taking into account the length of the name could also be helpful, or
the number of existing profiles for the name.

This is another metric we can use in deciding to set the initial selection to “Add new person”.

The likelihood of changing jobs is also probably small when considering
two tracks for the same conference.

In case a person with the same name already has a role within the same conference, we might also set the initial selection to the existing person. This would help in preventing duplicates, just like the affiliation similarity measure.

Submitted by Elmer van Chastelet on 20 September 2019 at 13:37