Further Information

REGISTER

To start using Normalator you will need to register for an account. You will be asked for your Name and Email address and a login username and password.

LOGIN

Login using the user name and password you created when you registered your account.

SERVICES

After login you will see the My Services page. You may create a Service from by clicking the Create Service button.

A Service is a set of Categories and corresponding Rules.

A Service usually relates to the field in your database into which you will save your Categories. For Example: If you are Normalating the Job Title field then Job Level would be a Service as would Job Function.

CATEGORIES

Categories are the values you wish to save to your database once a field has been Normalated.

Example 1: When normalating a Job Title field to obtain a Job Level then each job level is a category.

Job Title = Database Administrator

After normalation:

Job Level = Technical <- this is your Category.

Job Levels will have several Categories E.g.

• C-Level
• Manager
• Supervisor
• Technician
• Administrator

Example 2: When normalating Job Title to obtain a Job Function:

Job Title = Financial Controller

After normalation:

Job Function = Finance

Job Functions will have several Categories E.g.

• IT
• Finance
• Procurement
• Sales
• Marketing
• Logistics
• Executive

What Categories should I choose?

This depends on your business. The templates have simple examples that should relate to most businesses but you may wish to choose different categories based on what is important to your business.

Category Label

When configuring a Service you may set the label for your Categories. This helps make a Service more meaningful to users.

Services Tab->Edit->Categories Label

The format of the field is  <singular>|<plural> [Job Level|Job Levels]

The Label for the Categories field will appear on your the Rules list of your Service.

RULES

A Rule set is the heart of the Normalator process. For each field value passed to Normalator a set of rules is executed and a resultant Category is returned. For example:

Job Title = Chief Executive Officer and Financial Controller

After normalation using the Job Level Service:

Job Level = C-Level

The results of the normalation are based on the Rules you create:

Rule	Category	Expression
CEO	C-Level	CEO|Chief Executive|C.E.O.

 

In this example normalator is comparing the expression CEO|Chief Executive|C.E.O. to the Job Title. Because the Job Title contains the words “Chief Executive” the Category returned = C-Level.

Multiple Matches

Consider the previous example:

Job Title = Chief Executive Officer and Financial Controller

If there are multiple rules that result in a match:

Rule Name	Category	Expression
CEO	C-Level	CEO|Chief Executive|C.E.O.
Manager	Manager	Manager|Management|Mgr|Controller

 

Then the order that the matched words appear becomes important. Because Chief Executive appears before Controller in the Job Title then C-Level will be returned as the Category.

Expressions

Normalator used an advanced matching technique called Regular Expressions. This is a global standard mechanism for matching text patterns. There are a many resources on using Regular Expressions and it is possible to become very sophisticated in your matching expression.

In most cased however, a simple one or two word exact match will suffice.

By default all matching expressions will ignore case.

Simple wildcards

To create a Rule using a wildcard you can use the Regular Expression syntax “.*” (dot star). This will match all letters until a whitespace is encountered. E.g.

Expression = Manag.* will match Manager, Management, Managing

For more information about Regular Expressions see here…

TOOL SET

Instructions

Each Service will have its own instructions depending on the template you chose to create the service.

Files/Data

Preparation

Before using Normalator in anger, you may wish to create a training file to help Normalator quickly set up the rules and categories.

Or if you intend to Normalate a CSV file manually

A training file can be used across several Services but must have the following format (CSV):

Column	Name	Purpose
1	Source Field	Actual examples or field contents from your database E.g. Job Titles
2	Category	Categories you have selected for the example source field contents
3	Reference	A reference code or Id from your database. Normalator does not change this