Patentee Name Harmonisation - ecoom.be

1.1.4 Replace accented characters
Description
Some foreign languages such as French and German use accented characters like “é” or “ü”.
However, these accented characters are not always used in the spelling of names and,
therefore, should be replaced with their unaccented equivalents.
For some characters in some languages, replacement of accented characters with unaccented
equivalents might not be straightforward because of alternative spelling. For example,
characters in German (and in other languages such as Hungarian) with a diacritic mark
(’umlaut’: “ä”, “ö”, “ü”) have an alternative spelling with an additional “e”; therefore, the real
equivalent of “wärme” is “waerme”, the real equivalent of “förderung” is “foerderung” and the
real equivalent of “für” is “fuer”. However, in practice, the simplified spelling can also be found,
so both “für”, “fuer” and “fur” can appear. This raises the question whether the German “ä”, “ö”
and “ü” should be replaced by “a”, “o” and “u” or “ae”, “oe” and “ue” respectively.
As the simplified spelling (without the additional “e”) already appears in the original names, in
addition to the accented spelling and the real equivalent with the additional “e”, all accented
characters are replaced with their simple underlying equivalent without an umlaut and without
an additional “e”. This means that, as a result of this cleaning step, “für” will be harmonized
with “fur”, but “fuer” will not be harmonized with “fur” or “für”.
A separate step – Umlaut harmonization - will be used later on to harmonize language-specific
spelling variations of accented characters.
Analysis
All kinds of accented characters can appear in different languages. An exhaustive list of all
possible accented characters in all languages has not been used. Instead, this step focuses on
those characters that can be represented as a single character, as defined by the standard
ASCII/ANSI character code page. All other possible accented characters cannot always be
represented correctly by all software, and are mostly coded (see above, SGML and proprietary
coded characters).
Table 9 contains the accented characters that can be found in the ASCII/ANSI character code
page and their unaccented variant (only uppercase characters are taken into account, as the
dataset is supposed only to contain uppercase characters).
Table 9: Accented characters and their unaccented equivalent
CODE CHARACTER UNACCENTED
EQUIVALENT
192 "À" "A"
193 "Á" "A"
194 "Â" "A"
195 "Ã" "A"
196 "Ä" "A"
197 "Å" "A"
198 "Æ" "AE"
199 "Ç" "C"
200 "È" "E"
201 "É" "E"
202 "Ê" "E"
203 "Ë" "E"
204 "Ì" "I"
205 "Í" "I"
206 "Î" "I"
207 "Ï" "I"
209 "Ñ" "N"
210 "Ò" "O"
211 "Ó" "O"
212 "Ô" "O"
213 "Õ" "O"
214 "Ö" "O"
217 "Ù" "U"
218 "Ú" "U"
219 "Û" "U"
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