Damerau-Levenshtein With Optimal String Alignment Distance

Damerau-Levenshtein with optimal string alignment distance, also known as Damerau-Levenshtein with OSA distance, is a string metric for measuring the difference between two sequences. It is a variant of the Damerau-Levenshtein distance algorithm, which allows for the use of adjacent transpositions. In addition to this, the OSA variant also takes into account the possibility of inserting additional characters into the strings being compared in order to align them more closely. This means that the algorithm can more accurately measure the difference between two strings that may have different lengths or may not be perfectly aligned with each other.

At Tilores we use the Damerau-Levenshtein with optimal string alignment distance algorithm as one of the potential data record matching algorithms for entity resolution. These can be combined with other matching algorithms to allow fine-tuned data matching and deduplication.