Fuzzy Searching

Fuzzy Searching project was developed to detect and remove duplicates from a dataset of names.

Features

• Detect duplicates that have slightly different first name and last name but refer to the same person
• Flexible and customizable way to remove and merge duplicates
• Ability to view the cleaned dataset and merged duplicates and having report as PDF file
• Automatically correct common formatting errors in the names (e.g. capitalization, punctuation)
• Detect and handle non-Latin characters and special characters in the names (e.g. diacritics, accents, emojis)

Usage

Note: Out of the box, there is a sample database 'duplicate_project_ava.sql' in the root directory which you can import and have a preview of how everything looks like in this project.

Functionality of Pages
The purpose and functionality of pages in this web application are listed as below:

• Create User
  In this page you can create users so we can detect duplicates of them later on.
  

• Detect Duplicates
  Main purpose of the application will be answered here!
  After opening this page the algorithm of detection automatically runs and show a table of duplicate users.
  This table have entries such as First Name, Last Name and an action method for duplicate items.
  
  In the action section we can Remove or Merge duplicates as listed below:
  
  Remove Action
  After clicking the remove button, we will have a new table with selected duplicate users. Now we can remove any of the duplicate items as we require.
  
  Merge Action
  After clicking the merge button, we will have a new table with selected duplicate users. Now, by choosing an item we can merge other duplicates into selected item.
  

Note: We can customize percentage of similarity in showDuplicateUsers() method in UserController.

• View Users
  The cleaned dataset of users will be shown in this page. Also, we can export the report of data into the PDF file by clicking the 'export to PDF' button.
  
  Note: If there are any duplicate items, you SHOULD first run the algorithm by VISITING DETECT DUPLICATES page in order to Remove or Merge duplicates!
  

• Merged Users
  Details of Merged Users will be shown in this page. Also, we can export the report of data into the PDF file by clicking the 'export to PDF' button.