Foreign name and address data could be data sourced from foreign countries, local data from a different geographic or cultural background, or simply data which has been previously unseen by your systems.

Such data is becoming more common in computer systems because of increasing multiculturalism, business globalization, electronic commerce, and because increasing amounts of identity data are being sold or shared in the market place.

A common problem in coping with foreign data is thinking that rigid standards as applied to known local data, will work for the foreign data. Requesting unformatted or loosely formatted name and address data is the best way of obtaining reliability and completeness. Asking the data to be formatted according to strict rules is inviting assumptions and choices which can vary from person to person, country to country.

The different character sets used to capture and store the data also poses another problem. It does not make sense to stabilize and lose that information if the data is to be used to reach the source again. Yet, to match such data it is necessary to ignore variation in the character forms.

The best approach is to request foreign data unformatted and in its raw form, and to store it as such. Now, at least you have the best possible data available on the system.

Recognize that different business systems will want to use the data in different ways and leave it up to specialized software to overcome the problems associated with each business need. Don’t try to overcome these problems before the data is stored.

William Stuart Harison	117- 2a Jacksen Rd., East Hartford, CT 06987
Kwok Ki Ho (William)	Block C, 4th Floor, Unit 7, 234 Wan Chai Road, Hong Kong
Mmd Farook Akbar	Block A 27 Jalan Tuanku Abdul Raman, Kuala Lumpur
Augusto Frederico R.Schneider	Aven. Maria C. de Aguiar, 235 cj. 32 São Paulo, SP - 02593.001
Keser Geylani Abdulkadir	Urt. Mahallesi Karaafat C.603/97 S.No.186 Syhan/Adana