Merging Data Sets Based on Partially Matched Data Elements by Tony Hirst.
From the post:
A tweet from @coneee yesterday about merging two datasets using columns of data that don’t quite match got me wondering about a possible R recipe for handling partial matching. The data in question related to country names in a datafile that needed fusing with country names in a listing of ISO country codes.
Reminds me of the techniques used in record linkage (epidemiology). There, unlike topic maps, the records from diverse sources were mapped to a target record layout and then analyzed.
Quite powerful but lossy with regard to the containers of the original data.