Person Name Process Definition Files

Each variant has its own process definition file (standardizer.xml) that defines the state model for standardizing free-form person names. Each of these files also includes a section that defines just normalization without parsing for person names. The process definition file is located in the resource folder under each variant name. For information about the structure of this file, see Process Definition File.

Person name standardization has several states, each defining how to process tokens when they are found in certain orders. The default file defines states for salutations, first names, middle names, last names, titles, suffixes, and separators. It defines provisions for instances when the fields do not appear in order or when the input string does not contain complete data. For example, the current definition handles instances where the input string is “FirstName, MiddleName, LastName” as well as instances where the input string is “LastName, FirstName, MiddleName”.

The process definition files for person names define several parsing rules for each field component. This file defines a set of cleansing rules to prepare the input string prior to any processing. Then the data is passed to the start state of the FSM. Most fields are preprocessed and then matched against regular expressions or against a list of values in a lexicon file (described in Person Name Lexicon Files). Postprocessing includes replacing regular expressions or normalizing the field value based on a normalization file (described in Person Name Normalization Files). The process definition files also define a set of normalization rules, which are followed when the incoming data already contains name information in separate fields and does not need to be parsed.