The process of establishing an Entity, rather than an Identity. For example; any one-to-many matching of characteristics or features of a group to derive "best fits" to raw data (not a yes/no outcome), such as in an AFIS (the law-enforcement Automated Fingerprint Identification System) or DNA matching process. Usually not performed in real-time due to the processing overheads.

Source: http://identityaccessman.blogspot.com/2006/08/identity-dictionary.html