Following up on the OpenRefine suggestion, here's a blog post I wrote last year that describes using it to consolidate terms. http://acrl.ala.org/techconnect/?p=3276
Margaret Heller Digital Services Librarian Loyola University Chicago 773-508-2686 -----Original Message----- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ken Irwin Sent: Friday, March 21, 2014 1:25 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [CODE4LIB] tool for finding close matches in vocabular list Hi folks, I'm looking for a tool that can look at a list of all of subject terms in a poorly-controlled index as possible candidates for term consolidation. Our student newspaper index has about 16,000 subject terms and they include a lot of meaningless typographical and nomenclatural difference, e.g.: Irwin, Ken Irwin, Kenneth Irwin, Mr. Kenneth Irwin, Kenneth R. Basketball - Women Basketball - Women's Basketball-Women Basketball-Women's I would love to have some sort of pattern-matching tool that's smart about this sort of thing that could go through the list of terms (as a text list, database, xml file, or whatever structure it wants to ingest) and spit out some clusters of possible matches. Does anyone know of a tool that's good for that sort of thing? The index is just a bunch of MySQL tables - there is no real controlled-vocab system, though I've recently built some systems to suggest known SH's to reduce this sort of redundancy. Any ideas? Thanks! Ken
