VIAF: The Virtual International Authority File
VIAF is a joint project of the Library of Congress (LC), the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), and OCLC. The project's goal is to match and link the library authority files.
The search box at the top of this page searches a prototype of VIAF, which is derived from the personal name authority and related bibliographic data of LC, DNB, and BnF. Matches are shown as links between records (in MARC-21 998 fields).
More information can be found at the OCLC Research VIAF Project page.
Libraries do something they call "name authority control". For most people in IT, this would be called "assigning unique identifiers to names." Identifying authors is considered one of the essential aspects of library cataloging, and it isn't done in any other bibliographic environment, as far as I know.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Using Wikipedia to disambiguate names
Silviu Cucerzan at Microsoft Research recently published a paper, "Large-Scale Named Entity Disambiguation Based on Wikipedia Data"
Igor Naming Consultants is a naming and branding agency creating powerful product and company names that propel and differentiate companies and products above the competition.