Hi @ines,
Thanks for the detailed answer and confirming what I suspected. I’ll work on the converter and move on directly with spaCy.
Would the patterns for EntityRuler be similar to those discussed here: https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/issues/1971 or https://spacy.io/usage/linguistic-features#adding-patterns-attributes, but with a label for the entity name?
At this immediate point, we are only looking for exact, and some more fuzzy string matches using more complex matching patterns, but, we at some point will definitely will want to train a model, along the lines of your response to this thread NER or PhraseMatcher?.
Since this is evolving into a spaCy usage thread, I will post relevant questions to StackOverflow.
And Python is my language of choice… so all is good! 
Cheers!