This panel contains the Accept & Reject Limits for all Matching Levels in this purpose. These will normally be Typical, Conservative & Loose. If this Purpose was cloned using the Create one combned Match Level option, then there will be a single Typical Matching Level.

Accept-Limit: This field is required and must be in the range 0-100

Reject-Limit: This field is required and must be in the range 0-100

Refer to the API Reference manual for further details on Accept & Reject Limits.

On the left hand side of this panel is a list of the fields which make up the chosen Purpose. Initially, the first field in the list is selected. The user may select a different field simply by clicking on it. On the right hand side are the settings which may be modified for the currently selected (highlighted) field. The available settings are:

Required: If selected, indicates that this field must be present during the call to

ssan3_match

. If

Required

is selected and this data item is not supplied to

ssan3_match

then an error will result.

Required

is mutually exclusive with

Optional

.

Optional: If selected, indicates that this field may be absent during the call to

ssan3_match

. Note that the absence of an

Optional

field will not degrade the score.

Optional

is mutually exclusive with

Required

.

Weight: This setting determines the weight of this field relative to the other fields in the purpose.

For example, when matching a Person_Name field with WEIGHT=2 and a DATE field with WEIGHT=1, then the Person_Name field will contribute two-thirds or 66% of the final overall score for the match.

Best Group: This is an optional setting. If specified, this must be a single alpha character which identifies the Best Group to which this field is to belong. One or more fields may belong to the same Best Group. When calculating the score, the best score in the group is used. The lower scores are discarded and the weight for each discarded field is set to 0. As only one field will contribute to the final score, then all members of the group should have the same weight specified.

Required Group: This is an optional setting. If specified, this must be a single alpha character which identifies the

Required Group

to which this field is to belong. One or more fields may belong to the same

Required Group

. The usage of this field is described in the following Count section.

Count: This setting is used in conjunction with Required Group above.

Count

is a numeric value which indicates the number of fields which should be present in this group. If

Count

fields of the group are not present, then, for all fields in this

Required Group

, all scores are set to 0 and all weights are set to maximum.

If

Required Group

is not present, then the Count setting is ignored.

Score Contribution - Contribution Threshold: These two settings allow control over whether the score for this field should contribute to the overall score. If the calculated score for this field is above or below

Contribution Threshold

, then this field is excluded from the final score calculation, ie. the weight for this field is set to zero.

The default behavior is to allow the field’s score to contribute to the final score, in which case the

Contribution Threshold

setting is ignored.

Score Accentuation - Accentuation Threshold: These two settings allow finer control over the score for this field. If the calculated score for this field is below

Accentuation Threshold

, then decrease its score to 0. Alternatively, if the calculated score for this field is above

Accentuation Threshold

, then increase its score to 100.

The default behavior is to always use the field’s original score, in which case the

Accentuation Threshold

setting is ignored.

Reference Record: This setting determines which Record will be used as the reference while calculating the score for this field. The options are:

Always use the File Record as the Reference
Always use the Search Record as the Reference
Use the Record with the most number of words as the Reference
Use the Record with the least number of words as the Reference

For example, when matching the names KEN JOHN PEEL and JOHN PEEL, if JOHN PEEL is chosen as the Reference Record then these two names will score 100 even though there is an extra word in the first name, whereas if KEN JOHN PEEL is chosen as the Reference Record then these two names will score 66.

Null Value Effect - Null Value Score: This setting determines how a null value supplied for this field will contribute to the overall score. The default behavior is that a null value will cause this field to be disregarded when calculating the overall score. Alternatively, a null value will cause a score equal to

Null Value Score

to be used for this field when calculating the overall score.

This is a free form comment area provided for the user to describe the intended use of the Purpose and record the history of any changes made to the Purpose.