generated: '2026-08-13' method: generated source: >- Authored for this topic profile from three published standards fetched during this pass — SCIM 2.0 Core Schema (RFC 7643, https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7643.txt, HTTP 200), vCard 4.0 (RFC 6350, https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6350.txt, HTTP 200), and the Schema.org machine-readable vocabulary (https://schema.org/version/latest/schemaorg-current-https.jsonld, HTTP 200). Attribute and property names below are read from those documents, not from recollection. This is a topic reference; no vendor publishes this file. name: Customer Database Vocabulary description: >- Controlled vocabulary for the systems of record that hold customer identity, profile, contact, preference, consent, and account data — the concepts that recur across CRM, customer data platforms, marketing automation, support, and billing, and the open standards that describe a customer record. terms: # --- the record itself --- - term: Customer Record definition: >- The system-of-record representation of a single customer, keyed by a stable internal identifier and assembled from profile, contact, preference, consent, and account attributes. - term: Golden Record definition: >- The single reconciled customer record produced by merging duplicates and resolving conflicts across source systems; the version downstream systems are told to trust. - term: Profile Attribute definition: >- A descriptive field on a customer record — name, birth date, job title, language — as distinct from a contact point or a behavioral event. - term: Contact Point definition: >- An addressable channel for reaching a customer (email address, telephone number, postal address, messaging handle). Multi-valued and typed in every major standard. standards: - 'Schema.org: contactPoint / email / telephone / address' - 'SCIM 2.0: emails, phoneNumbers, ims, addresses' - 'vCard 4.0: EMAIL, TEL, ADR, IMPP' - term: Primary Value definition: >- The one entry in a multi-valued attribute marked preferred for its type — SCIM expresses this as a boolean "primary" sub-attribute, vCard as the PREF parameter. - term: Identifier definition: >- A value that names a customer inside some namespace — an internal primary key, a SCIM "id" or "externalId", a vCard UID, a cookie or device ID, or a third-party account handle. - term: External Identifier definition: >- An identifier assigned by a system other than the one holding the record, used to correlate the same customer across systems without exposing internal keys. # --- identity resolution --- - term: Identity Resolution definition: >- The process of deciding that two or more records refer to the same real person, and linking or merging them accordingly. - term: Deterministic Matching definition: >- Identity resolution on exact agreement of a strong key such as an email address, phone number, or account number. - term: Probabilistic Matching definition: >- Identity resolution on weighted similarity across several weak attributes (name, address, birth date), producing a match score rather than a yes or no. - term: Identity Graph definition: >- The linked set of identifiers — known and pseudonymous — that a platform believes belong to one customer across web, mobile, and offline channels. - term: Merge definition: >- Collapsing two customer records into one, with a documented rule for which source wins per field and what happens to the losing record's identifiers. - term: Survivorship Rule definition: >- The per-field policy that decides which value survives a merge — most recent, most trusted source, most complete, or highest confidence. # --- consent and privacy --- - term: Consent Record definition: >- A dated, auditable statement of what a customer permitted, for which purpose, through which channel, and under which legal basis. - term: Purpose Limitation definition: >- The requirement that customer data collected for one stated purpose is not reused for an unrelated one; expressed in a record as a purpose attached to consent. - term: Legal Basis definition: >- The lawful ground for processing a customer's personal data — consent, contract, legal obligation, vital interests, public task, or legitimate interests. - term: Right to Erasure definition: >- A customer's right to have their personal data deleted, and the corresponding obligation on a customer database to propagate deletion to every downstream copy. - term: Right to Access definition: >- A customer's right to obtain the personal data held about them, which a customer database satisfies through an export or subject-access endpoint. - term: Data Portability definition: >- A customer's right to receive their data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format and to have it transmitted to another controller. - term: Suppression List definition: >- The set of contact points that must not be messaged regardless of what any other record says — unsubscribes, bounces, complaints, and legal holds. - term: Preference Center definition: >- The customer-facing surface where channel, topic, and frequency preferences are set, and the record those settings write to. - term: Pseudonymization definition: >- Replacing direct identifiers with a surrogate key so a record cannot be attributed to a customer without separately held information. - term: Data Subject definition: >- The identified or identifiable natural person a customer record describes; the party holding the rights the record must honor. # --- architecture --- - term: Customer Data Platform definition: >- A system that ingests customer data from many sources, resolves it to persistent unified profiles, and makes those profiles available to other systems. - term: System of Record definition: >- The authoritative store for a given customer attribute; the copy other systems reconcile against when they disagree. - term: Reverse ETL definition: >- Moving reconciled customer data out of a warehouse back into operational tools, the inverse of the ingestion path. - term: Change Data Capture definition: >- Emitting a stream of row-level changes from the customer database so downstream consumers stay current without polling. - term: Audience Segment definition: >- A named, queryable subset of customer records defined by attribute and behavior predicates, materialized for activation. - term: Trait definition: >- A named attribute attached to a customer profile by an event-based ingestion pipeline, as distinct from a column in a fixed schema. - term: Schema-on-Write definition: >- Validating and conforming customer data to a declared schema at ingestion time, rather than deferring interpretation to read time. # --- provisioning and interchange --- - term: SCIM definition: >- System for Cross-domain Identity Management — the IETF standard for provisioning and managing user records over REST, defining a core User schema and an enterprise extension. standards: - 'RFC 7643 (core schema)' - 'RFC 7644 (protocol)' - term: vCard definition: >- The IETF interchange format for contact records, defining typed properties for names, contact points, organizations, and relationships. standards: - 'RFC 6350' - term: Schema.org Person definition: >- The Schema.org type describing a person, used to mark up and exchange customer profile data on the open web as JSON-LD. standards: - 'https://schema.org/Person' - term: Bulk Operation definition: >- A single request carrying many customer creates, updates, or deletes, so a sync does not degrade into one HTTP call per record. - term: PATCH Semantics definition: >- Partial update of a customer record by operation list (add, replace, remove) against attribute paths, rather than replacing the whole resource. - term: Soft Delete definition: >- Marking a customer record inactive rather than removing it, preserving referential integrity and audit history — SCIM expresses this as the "active" boolean. standards_referenced: - name: SCIM 2.0 Core Schema url: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7643.txt status: 200 - name: SCIM 2.0 Protocol url: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7644.txt status: 200 - name: vCard 4.0 url: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6350.txt status: 200 - name: Schema.org vocabulary (JSON-LD) url: https://schema.org/version/latest/schemaorg-current-https.jsonld status: 200 - name: Schema.org Person url: https://schema.org/Person status: 200