e many common surnames come in a variety of spellings and continue to change over time and distance as a result of incorrectly inputted data, cultural differences in spelling, and transliteration errors.</p>

<p>Traditional string matching algorithms that use exact match or partial/overlap match perform poorly in this messy milieu of real world data. In contrast, the Soundex system groups names by phonetic structure to enable matching by pronunciation rather than literal character match. This makes tasks li