Shabash Merops

Place names

Merops uses massive dictionaries to identify and standardize the spelling and capitalization of place names including:

• countries, regions, cities and towns
• streets, parks, districts
• rivers, mountains, seas

Merops can standardize and correct former names to current names, for example:

• USSR → Russia
• Burma → Myanmar

Specific preferences

Merops can standardize specific place name preferences, such as US, USA, United States and United States of America. Many of these are context sensitive, allowing different preferences in general text, tables, references, and addresses.

Merops uses known place names, as well as pattern-matches to identify and standardize addresses, in a number of contexts. Merops can be enhanced using a custom dictionary.

Organizations

Merops uses massive dictionaries to identify and standardize the spelling, capitalization and abbreviation of organization names, e.g.:

• World Health Organisation → World Health Organization

Merops also uses intelligent pattern recognition to identify unknown titles of organizations (e.g. the British XML Organisation), and ensures spelling preferences within these are preserved. It can also alert these unknown organizations, if desired.

Merops can apply general preferences to organization names, e.g.:

• Fox Techonology, Ltd → Fox Technology Ltd

Merops can standardize company addresses, e.g.:

• US state style in company address
• Include or remove USA in company address

Merops can apply specific preferences for organization names, e.g.:

• EU ↔ European Union.

International context

Merops also uses pattern matches with multiple international languages for both abbreviated and full versions of institutional names.

People’s names

Matching

Merops uses a dictionary of over 300,000 given names and family names to identify and standardize people’s names.

Merops also uses intelligent pattern recognition, based on document context, using titles (Dr, Professor, etc.), surname prefixes (van, de, etc.), qualifications, affiliation links, and placement relative to document titles and author address details. These ‘unknown’ names can be alerted in case there is a spelling error or a misidentification.

Merops can standardize the punctuation and sequence of surname prefixes (van, de) and suffixes (Jr, III).

Qualifications

Merops identifies and standardizes punctuation and capitalization of qualifications following names. Unknown qualifications can be alerted, and honorific qualifications can be automatically deleted.

More qualifications can be added using a custom dictionary.

Titles

Merops can standardize the punctuation and spelling of titles and abbreviations, to conform to your preference. For example:

• Dr. → Dr
• Junior → Jr
• Mrs. Claudia Jones → Claudia Jones

Works and products

Merops can:

• standardize spellings and abbreviations of journal titles;
• standardize the use of ® and ™;
• standardize names of legislation;
• alert commonly misused trademarks, e.g. the use of ‘sellotape’, when ‘sticky tape’ is meant.