Patentee Name Harmonisation - ecoom.be

Result
383,707 names contain spaces or non-alphanumerical characters and have been condensed.
Impact
From 384,235 unique names to 365,866 unique names, an additional reduction of 18,369
names, or a total reduction of 77,856 names (17.5%).
2.5 Umlaut harmonization
Description
As described in a previous step - replace accented characters - German characters with a
diacritic mark (’umlaut’: “ä”, “ö”, “ü”) - cause spelling variations because words containing
these characters can occur in three guises, one with an umlaut (e.g. “für”), one with the
alternative spelling without an umlaut but with an additional “e” (e.g. “fuer”), and a simplified
form without an umlaut and without an additional “e” (e.g. “fur”).
Since all of these spelling variations appear in the organization names, simply replacing all
characters containing an umlaut with their simple underlying equivalent without an umlaut and
without an additional “e”, as in the earlier cleaning step, will not match all equivalent names.
This additional step will try to match the spelling variant without an umlaut but with an
additional “e” with the other spelling variations.
Other languages such as Hungarian also suffer from this problem but, in this step, emphasis is
placed on the German umlaut and its equivalent with an additional “e”.
Analysis
Since all three variations appear in organization names (sometimes more than one variation in a
name, e.g. “PATENT-TREUHEND-GESELLSCHAFT FUER ELEKTRISCHE GLÜHLAMPEN MBH”), no
straightforward solution is available.
Given the former example, creating two variations of all names with umlauts, one without an
umlaut but with an additional “e”, and one without an umlaut and without an additional “e”, will
not work because all kinds of combinations can appear in one name. Even if “PATENT-
TREUHEND-GESELLSCHAFT FUER ELEKTRISCHE GLÜHLAMPEN MBH” could be harmonized both
to “PATENT-TREUHEND-GESELLSCHAFT FUR ELEKTRISCHE GLUHLAMPEN MBH” and “PATENT-
TREUHEND-GESELLSCHAFT FUER ELEKTRISCHE GLUEHLAMPEN MBH”, the following variation
“PATENT-TREUHEND-GESELLSCHAFT FUR ELEKTRISCHE GLUEHLAMPEN MBH” would not be
matched.
Therefore, not only names containing umlauts have to be harmonized but all names will have to
be scanned for possible matches with a name containing an umlaut.
Simply adding an “e” to, or removing it from, all occurring “a”, “o” or “u” leads to many
mismatches, especially in the case of proper names containing “a”, “o” or “u”.
To eliminate these mismatches, only groups of matched names with at least one name originally
containing at least one umlaut are retained for the name harmonization. However, this
additional step to maintain accuracy greatly reduces the number of matches.
Implementation
Firstly, all occurrences of “AE”, “OE” and “UE” are replaced with “A”, “O” and “U” respectively in
all names (also in names originally containing no umlauts) by executing a series of update
queries on the data.
Next, all occurrences of “A”, “O” and “U” are again replaced with “AE”, “OE”, “UE” respectively
in all names (also in names originally containing no umlauts) by executing a series of update
queries on the data.
Next, all names originally containing an umlaut are marked by executing an update query on
the data.
Next, all names having a preliminary umlaut harmonized name (first removing “E” and next
adding “E” from and to “A”, “O” and “U”) that is equal to a preliminary umlaut harmonized name
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