Is there an application out there that will allow us to cleanse/merge-purge
the name fields for a consumer as well as for a commercial data warehouse?

In other words, we want to take, for example, Walmart, Wal-Mart, Walmart
Corp, etc and boil it down to a single WalMart Corporation entity.

An example of the consumer side would be Jim Smith, James E. Smith, Jimmy
Smith, etc.

We're using Oracle 8.i as a database.

Thanks!

"Paul Stanial" <p_stanial (AT) webfirst (DOT) com> wrote:

NO. <--The short answer...it's what's for dinner.

However, I BELIEVE! what you describe would be considered an extreme
version of "householding" that would require training a neural net
and/or a prodigal son or 12,000 to access a database containing all
the corporate trade-marks, legal, illegal, and evolving slang terms
associated with business and consumers all over the world. The
timeliness, accruacy and therefore the usefulness of such a database
once constructed would be highly suspect except as a grad student
exercise for a son-of-a-bitch you didn't like very much.

Best,
dmcmunn

"Paul Stanial" <p_stanial (AT) webfirst (DOT) com> wrote