Are there not also licensing issues that OCLC haven't really resolved?
Barry
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Richard Light
Sent: 20 December 2013 16:26
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MCG] Tate artists
On 20/12/2013 15:01, Paul Shackleton wrote:
> I would point you in the direction of OCLC's Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), Librarians have been dealing with defining individual names for a very long time. See the following links for the interface and info on the API and research:
>
> http://www.viaf.org/
>
> http://www.oclc.org/viaf.en.html
>
> http://www.oclc.org/developer/services/virtual-international-authority
> -file-viaf
>
> http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/viaf.html
Paul,
I'm aware of VIAF, and it raises some interesting issues about the problem of identifying people unambiguously.
VIAF is an "after the event" reconciliation service, which brings together name authority data from participating institutions (mostly, but not all, national libraries). This relies on the people in question coming to the notice of bibliographic cataloguers, either as authors or
(presumably) as subjects within published works. The name authority entries themselves found in VIAF are far from unique (there are five people other than me with the name authority "Light, Richard"), and one thing which VIAF does right is to assign a unique, numerical identifier to each cluster of records signifying the same individual. Thus I have the VIAF identity www.viaf.org/viaf/67713682. This identifier is amenable to Linked Data principles, so I can use it to grab my data as RDF, XML, JSON, etc. Thus far, all is lovely.
One problem I have with VIAF is that I don't see how I would use it to disambiguate an individual programmatically. If I run a search for "Richard Light", I get an HTML page listing 17 hits, and I have to scan it by eye, with a knowledge of what I have published, to work out which one is me. I then have to follow that link, again manually, to find out what my VIAF identity is. However, looking more closely at the VIAF site, I find that there is an OpenSearch interface [1] which allows me to put my search in a way that returns an XML response [2]. This is useful; for example one could set up a "web termlist" to return these 17 records, and let the user pick which one matches the person they are cataloguing. (This is what I have done, for example, with Geonames.)
However, the problem remains that the name authority information against which one is searching is not designed for this purpose, and so is suboptimal. It is a matter of chance which of a person's names and initials will be used in a name authority record, and whether their dates of birth and death will be included in it. So you have no idea what to search for. Typically dates will not be given, and /place /of birth and death doesn't feature in the VIAF framework at all. (There's a Richard Light in the list with the same birth year as me, who isn't me ...)
The other problem with VIAF is that it is designed to be populated by national bibliographic agencies with information relating to published works. Thus (a) it isn't open to "crowd sourcing" approaches and (b) by design, it can only deal with a small subset of the human race.
Thanks for the prompt: it led me to discover that you can use the "web termlist" approach with VIAF, something I hadn't appreciated.
Best wishes,
Richard
[1]
http://oclc.org/developer/documentation/virtual-international-authority-file-viaf/request-types
[2]
http://viaf.org/viaf/search?query=local.personalNames+all+%22Richard%20Light%22+&maximumRecords=100&sortKeys=holdingscount&httpAccept=text/xml
--
*Richard Light*
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