3 ms·
In genealogical research it's typical to not only standardize capitalization of family names (typically to ALL CAPS) but to also standardize spelling to the mos
by jcrawfordor 7y ago
In genealogical research it's typical to not only standardize capitalization of family names (typically to ALL CAPS) but to also standardize spelling to the most common or first used spelling. Otherwise searching becomes a very frustrating venture, and these things change surprisingly quickly through generations.
- mcguire 7y agoGood luck with mcguire. ;-)
- YawningAngel 7y agoWould this not render fairly unambiguously to MAGUIDHIR (?spelling, corrected in an edit as I got it wildly wrong)? It only seems confusing if you're not Irish, and I'm already completely at sea with names that aren't Western European so this seems like a fine tradeoff to make.
- mcguire 7y agoUnambiguously? Yep. (And wow, I'm impressed.) But you're going to dreadfully confuse people looking for Mark McGwire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_McGwire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_McGwire), for example. (And possibly "MacGuiver". I'm kind of unconvinced that it's related.)
- wyldfire 7y agoA long time back soundex [1] was used for matching things like names. I imagine there might be yet better algorithms these days but that one probably still solves this problem relatively well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex EDIT: I guess there are better ones: metaphone [2] is a modern improvement on soundex. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphone