Best way to migrate text field to taxonomy reference field I want to migrate a text field to taxonomy reference field( the Tags one).

I've 1200 nodes having a field "Organization name". Those creating the content are making mistakes like misspelled company names. I'm using the company name in the views to find all related nodes.

This will help those entering can simply choose the company names or if someone has entered IBM for International Business Machines then I can merge those terms when using taxonomy reference field.

Should I go and create a vocabulary, add all existing values as terms in vocabulary then programmatically assign the text field values to the taxonomy reference field? Then delete the text field and change references in the views etc.
I would:


Go thorough all values, grouping them by their Levenshtein distance from each other.
For all set of similar names, I would choose canonical one, and put them in taxonomy as a term. 
Using Computed Field or VBO I would choose the Levenshtein closest term for each node.


Details of implementation would need a bit of polishing, but that's my general approach. Apparently you can use Views Bulk Operations both to create taxonomy terms and to set field's value on node.