Are there free, low cost, or open source tools for matching name/address data?

Question

This question is related to Tools for matching name/address data. There is a number commercial tools provided by SAS, Oracle, Microsoft, etc., that allow to de-duplicate or merging names of individuals or companies coming from multiple sources.

However, after reading the answers to the question mentioned before, I wondered why a seemingly interesting problem didn't receive any answers mentioning open source projects that could tackle the problem.

Are you aware of any open source projects or algorithms to implement the so called "record linking", "record merging", or "clustering"?

Answer 1

Soon Gridworks will be available, you just need to wait. Freebase is a leading organization in information management. It will be a great tool.

Answer 2

I stumble upon the following article: "Merge/Purge and Duplicate Detection".

By looking at http://www.semaphorecorp.com I found some extremely low prices.

This is not what I'm looking for, but at least is a bit of help, and a step on the right direction.

Answer 3

I'd recommend Gridworks as an open source (New BSD license) tool for parsing and fixing crufty data. It also allows clustering and reconciling of duplicate data, as well as having data-mining features.

Used it to import and fix a lot of data in various formats, .csv, .tsv, .xls, .xml etc. with success. It can be used in-house without sending any data externally, which seemed to be a concern of the question "tools for matching name/address data"

Gridworks was released as version 1.1 in May 2010, and the developers are busy with a 2.0 release planned sometime later in 2010.