What is "caverphone"

The Caverphone phonetic matching algorithm was created by David Hood in the Caversham Project at the University of Otago in New Zealand in 2002, revised in 2004. It was created to assist in data matching between late 19th century and early 20th century electoral rolls, where the name only needed to be in a "commonly recognisable form". The algorithm was intended to apply to those names that could not easily be matched between electoral rolls, after the exact matches were removed from the pool of potential matches. The algorithm is optimised for accents present in the study area (southern part of the city of Dunedin, New Zealand).