When One Company Appears Under Ten Different Names
Company names often look like clean identifiers in a database.
In reality, they rarely are.
In one 811 organization's historical ticket data, contractor names were entered as free-form text. The same company could therefore appear under several variations:
- GA Power
- GA Power Co.
- GA Power Company
Other differences came from punctuation, abbreviations, spelling mistakes, legal suffixes, or inconsistent spacing.
To a person, these clearly look like the same organization. To a database, they are separate entities.