Starting October 15, 2025, we are planning to remove out-of-use entity identifiers from the referents list after a grace period. At present, the referents associated with entities include all IDs of source entities that have been used to describe the entity in the past, including those no longer present in our dataset. This has lead to over 100,000 entity IDs mentioned in referents which are no longer associated with any source data. In the future, we plan to remove ("garbage collect") unused referents after ca. 6 months.
Users of the data may need to update monitoring systems in which referents is used to suppress repeat alarms for a matched entity in a screening system. When an entity ID is changed and moved to referents, consumer systems should update their internal reference to the main (canonical) entity ID when drift is observed.
