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The DND name matching scheme is intended to make it possible to look up people using any reasonable form of their name. Parts of the name (like middle initials) can be omitted entirely, or given as an initial substring. Users may add nicknames to their DND record, allowing you to look them up by something other than their "official" name.
The basic steps in name matching are splitting the query into words and finding the DND records that potentially match those query words. This set of matches may then be further reduced by two additional rules: The "match quality" rule (designed to help people whose name is a prefix of someone else's) and the "perfect match" rule (which guarantees that a person's full name matches only them).
Key Words and Comparison Rules
At Dartmouth, the Full Name, Nicknames, and Department/Class fields of the DND user record together constitute the name lookup keys for that record. Other sites may specify their own key fields. The Query-name is matched against these keys.
Both the Query-name and the DND entry keys are treated as a series of words separated by spaces:
- Apostrophes are removed; other punctuation characters are equivalent to spaces (that is, they delimit words).
- The order of the words within the query or the DND entry is not significant.
- Upper- and lower-case distinctions are not significant.
Finding Potential Matches
"Potential" matches are those DND records for which:
- Each query word matches a word in the DND entry, either as an initial substring or completely (an "exact match").
- At least one multi-letter query word matches a word in the DND entry.
- A given word in the DND entry can be used as a match for a query word only once.
Match Quality
The "quality" of a potential match is the number of exact matches of multi-letter query words.
A match of a given quality supersedes any potential matches of lower quality.
For example, given a query "Jo Steele" and keys "Jo Steele" and "John Steele," "Jo Steele" is matched with quality two; the lower-quality match of the other name is not considered.
The Perfect Match Rule
The above rules notwithstanding:
- If the query words exactly match the contents of the Name field of the DND entry, the query matches that record uniquely.
- The DND server requires that the Name field be unique; this guarantees that a person's full name always resolves uniquely to them. This is an important feature because of the dynamic nature of the DND. A nickname or abbreviation that resolves uniquely today may stop working tomorrow if another user chooses the same nickname, but we promise that the user's full name will continue to match only them.
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