Thanks for looking!BackgroundI have been tasked with writing a program to normalize and ingest data from various sources to a common database.For the sake of simplicity, let's say that the program is for a public library system, and that they are wanting to maintain a database of all books currently lent out of their various branches.  Let's further assume that the branches are not linked to a common network or database (silly, I know, but please bear with me).The task is to accept submitted data from the various branch managers, and then automate the process of normalizing that data and storing it into the common database.Variable raw data formatsThe raw data may be submitted in the form of a MS Excel file, a .csv, a tab-delimited file, a plain text file, possibly even just a simple email, a field delimited file, etc.Loosely related data contentsThe contents of the raw data files will generally contain these fields:Book IDBook TitleAuthorIs Checked Out?Days OverdueISBNDue date. . .and so on.  The problem is that some of the submitted data files will have these fields in column headers and some will not (so will need to infer from data what the field is).  Further, the field names will not always be consistent.  One library branch may call the boolean field for whether a book is checked out OnLoan, while another branch calls it IsCheckedOut.Common data repositoryAll of this data will be ingested to a common database with normalized data that has been cleaned up during the ingest process.So, hopefully, we have something like this in the final DB:BranchIdBookIdTitleCheckedOutISBNDueDateDaysOverdue. . .and so on.Automation of Ingest ProcessLet's assume that there are thousands of branches and that they must each issue this report to the Library HQ once monthly. Obviously, my client can hire a bunch of data-entry people to do this job (in fact, that is how it is done today).  The request from them however, is to automate as much of this as possible to cut data-entry costs.So here is my plan, please suggest or criticize away:Standardize the file submission process.  This will be handled by creating a web page with a file upload dialog, DONE!Determine the file type.  I will be using C# (not that language matters) and it has a pretty easy way of getting the file type but sometimes I will simply get a .txt that turns out to be tab or pipe-delimited so I need an algorithm to detect this.  I am thinking of using a Bayes Classifier or Artificial Neural Network for this.Attempt to parse the data into memory.  Now I have hopefully determined if I have an excel file, a tab-delimited, a csv, etc.  I will run the file through the correct parser to get it into memory but now need to determine if the file has headers or if I can infer what the headers should be by the value.  For this I hope to again use a Bayes Classification system and perhaps calculate a Levenshtein Distance from the value to items in an array of known/standardized header names.  But what about header inference from the data?  How would I identify one column as containing due dates and one as containing ISBN numbers?Glean, clean and submit the values in each column.  If I am lucky enough to have gotten this far (I know what the headers are), then I need to loop through the values in each column and clean/normalize them.  For example, some library branches may enter an ISBN value as ISBN12-345-67-89 whereas another branch enters 123456789.  I need to catch that difference and normalize them.  Is this a case for just a plain ol' expert system or if. . .then?  Is there a better way?Submit normalized data to database.  This step is not as trivial as it sounds because some library branches may report a book title as Algorithms for Dummies while another reports it as Algorithms for Dummies, 1st Edition.  Let's assume for a second that I don't have an ISBN to tie the two books together (though they are the same), what method might be suitable for deducing that these books are the same and assigning them a common primary key int the related Books table?Many, Many thanks for your suggestions!!!
Algorithm, AI, or intelligent agent suggestions for ingesting poorly-formatted & variable data from different document types
algorithms;artificial intelligence;statistics