On Wed, 19 Sep 2001 21:20:15 +0100, you wrote: >>The best forum is currently to send it to [email protected] >>however, and Dave will correct me if I am wrong because I haven't looked >>at the code for a while, when we do a rebuild, all districts that are >>not in the current matchinglist are pulled out and identified. It is a >>task we do to then identify the relevant real district for >>normalisation. This means that we will catch new districts as >>mis-spellings appear. > >Can you expand on this or is it explained anywhere on the site? I read >that as meaning that all variations are treated as one - which seems >like common sense to me. They are. All known variants are treated as one. We have a big lookup table of known variants, and add to it as new variants appear. >>I know this email sounds like I am rebuffing you on each point, that is >>not the intention ... your feedback is important but you do also need to >>take into account that we have limited time in sorting things out :) >> >>And. of course... if you have Perl and Unix skills .. feel free to join >>the programming team ! :)) > >If I had, I would )-: Actually, maintaining the table requires no Unix or Perl. (Just a willingness to work for hours on end on a thankless task, cursing the fact that some people appear to be very careless in their spelling). The format of the aliases file is slightly esoteric, but quite easy to learn. -- Dave Mayall