>'I always assumed that technology like that would find its way into more applications, but I'm constantly surprised it hasn't.' Many years ago, I was working

>'I always assumed that technology like that would find its way into more applications, but I'm constantly surprised it hasn't.' Many years ago, I was working on a large project for an organization nothing apparently consistent between half a dozen systems with tens of thousands of users each except names. Naturally, those names were full of exactly the kind of variations you're describing. When I went looking for a solution to do exactly what you're describing I ran into solutions that were both vague about their functionality and expensive. Like you say, pretty niche - it seemed that everyone was used to selling very specific 'solutions' not a library/API. I ended up hacking together a very basic script to accomplish the same. It took days to run thanks to my non-existent coding skills, but the accuracy was pretty good. What it couldn't line up was solved by later decoding and discovering correlations between the long forgotten conventions used for unique IDs in the various systems.