Who developed the various soundex systems?
The original idea for soundexing is credit to Robert Russell in 1918. He was the developer of what is now known as the Russell Soundex System. His system was later improved upon and became the American Soundex system that is used by the US government in such applications as indexing the US census records. More recently the Daitch-Mokotoff (DM) Soundex System developed by Randy Daitch and Gary Mokotoff in 1985 has become the standard for use in indexing Eastern European names. Algorithms for computing Russell Soundex codes and American Soundex codes are fairly straightforward. DM Soundex codes are much more difficult to implement. Michael Tobias is credited with having done some of the early work in developing the algorithms for computing DM soundex codes and for the original implementation of those algorithms. The DM implementation used in this tool is based on Tobias’s original implementation. Click here for more details on the various soundex systems.
