How to detect duplicate data?

Question

I have got a simple contacts database but I\'m having problems with users entering in duplicate data. I have implemented a simple data comparison but unfortunately the duplicate

Answer 1

FullContact.com has API's that can solve this for you, see their documentation here: http://www.fullcontact.com/developer/docs/?category=name.

They have APIs for Name Normalization (Bill into William), Name Deducer (for raw text), and Name Similarity (comparing two names).

All APIs are free at the moment, it could be a good way to get started.