We do a fair deal of data reporting and extraction on local county tax records for a variety of clients (Tax collection, lawyers, accountants, etc). One of the more interesting aspects of this data mining, is when we are required to retrieve, normalize and create reports based on the data from state or local sources.
The local sources are often challenging as they sometimes have no data integrity rules in place to dictate the format for either first or last names. Often times, the data does not have any “legend” or data specification, so we need to deduce our own rules.
When the data can also include sub-owners, the problem becomes exponentially greater.
