Matching names is an common application for fuzzy matching. But it also happens in other area's. Take for instance a situation in the airline industry. I want to match last year's flights with this year's flights. What are the matching elements: Flight number, flight leg (from-to), flight date, departure and arrival time. Quite likely that one or more of those elements cannot be matched: new flight number, same flight number but new departure time and so on. Even matching on flight date is problematic. Match on calendar date or shift a day to match on day of week (to analyse weekly patterns).

For these situations I have developed a 'fuzzy merge' that takes e.g. this year's flight data set and steps through last year's data set to find the closest match.