Case Study: NYU Builds a Smarter University Directory with Basis Technology’s Rosette Name Matching

Building a virtual quad to connect an international community

New York University (NYU) set out to build the NYUHome Portal, a new intranet designed to connect its large, international, and geographically dispersed community. To make the portal useful from day one, NYU needed a strong people directory search experience, but accurate name matching proved difficult because of nicknames, spelling variations, transliterations, and multilingual names.

Basis Technology provided Rosette name matching, integrated through an Elasticsearch plugin, to power NYU’s directory search. The solution added fuzzy matching for nicknames, transliteration differences, and other name variations while saving the NYU team months of development effort. The portal launched successfully, expanded from a 3,000-person pilot to 120,000 users with 60,000 searchable profiles, and helped users begin populating the system with 1,800 categories selected from a 90,000-category dictionary.

New York University

Madan Dorairaj

Product Manager