Understanding the Master Index Standardization Engine

Business Name Processing Fields

When standardizing free-form business names, 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.

Business Name Standardized Fields

The Master Index Standardization Engine expects that business name data will be provided in a free-form text field containing several components that must be parsed. By default, the match engine is configured to parse these components, and to normalize and phonetically encode the business name. You can specify additional fields for phonetic encoding.

If you specify the BusinessName match type for any field in the wizard, a standardization structure for that field is defined in mefa.xml. The fields listed underBusiness Name Object Structure are automatically defined as the target fields. If you do not specify business name fields for matching in the wizard but want to standardize the fields, you can create a standardization structure in mefa.xml

Business Name Object Structure

For the default configuration of the BusinessName data type, the name field specified for standardization is parsed into several additional fields, one of which is also normalized. If you specify the BusinessName match type in the wizard, the following fields are automatically added to the object structure and database creation script.

You can add these fields manually if you do not specify a match type in the wizard.