Sorting Hat maintains an SQL database of unique identities of
communities members across (potentially) many different sources.
Identities corresponding to the same real person can be merged in the
same individual, with a unique uuid. For each individual, a profile can
be defined, with the name and other data shown for the corresponding
person by default.

In addition, each individual can be related to one or more affiliations,
for different time periods. This will usually correspond to different
organizations in which the person was employed during those time periods.

Sorting Hat is a part of the GrimoireLab toolset, which provides Python
modules and scripts to analyze data sources with information about
software development, and allows the production of interactive
dashboards to visualize that information.

In the context of GrimoireLab, Sorting Hat is usually run after data is
retrieved with Perceval, to store the identities obtained into its
database, and later merge them into individuals (and maybe affiliate
them).