General settings:

Number of qualifications (father/grandfather/ancestor/clan) in addition to forename required to consider a name citation "fully qualified"
Assumed typical length of active business life (years)
Assumed typical length of whole life (years)

Intra-document rules:

These rules are applied first, to collapse Persons within a single document.

Collapse partially or fully qualified Persons with same generational rank in the document, with equal references, in the same document, with compatible roles for the generational rank.

We consider the generationalRank in considering the roles, since the primary persons cannot collapse across certain roles, but fathers often can.

Collapse simple references into more qualified references in the same document, with the same generational rank in the document, and with a compatible role.
Collapse less qualified references into more qualified references in the same document, with the same generational rank in the document, and with a compatible role.

Inter-document rules:

These rules are applied next, to collapse Persons across documents within a corpus.

Collapse fully qualified and equal references across documents.
Collapse simple references into more qualified names in other documents.
Collapse less qualified references into more qualified names in other documents.