Telephone Number Processing Fields

When standardizing telephone data, not all fields in a record need to be processed by the Master Index Standardization Engine. The standardization engine only needs to process fields that must be parsed, normalized, or phonetically converted. For a master index application, these fields are defined in mefa.xml and processing logic for each field is defined in the Standardization Engine node configuration files.

Telephone Number Standardized Fields

The Master Index Standardization Engine can process telephone data that is contained in one long free-form field and can parse that field into its individual components. By default, the standardization engine separates telephone numbers into these field components: country code, area code, phone number, and extension.

Telephone Number Object Structure

To standardize telephone numbers in a master index application, you need to manually define the standardization structure and you need to add the fields that will store the standardized field components to the object structure. In the default implementation, you can store any combination of the following telephone number field components in the master index database.

• Country Code

• Area Code

• Phone Number

• Extension

The standardization engine has the capability to produce all of the above field components, but you only need to store the ones you need in the master index database.