The Discovery Center groups data values with similar patterns and identifies those values that share a phonetic pattern, or metaphone. A metaphone is similar to a soundex , but provides more refined results by comparing values against a multi-character phonetic pattern. Unlike a soundex, a metaphone is not limited in the length of the phonetic representation.
You use a metaphone to find misspellings in values and to identify discrepancies in data targeted for cleansing. When examining metaphones, you can choose to check every metaphone listed for an attribute or only those metaphones that look suspicious.
Metaphones ignore punctuation, digits, and case, and re-map common characters and groups of characters.
- Example:
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In the case where a Limited Corporation name is followed by LTD, LTD., or Ltd, an analysis by metaphone lets you identify whether there are inconsistencies in the company name, and helps you to decide how you want to standardize and clean up the data.