The Virtual InternationalAuthority File

Thomas Hickey

ACIG2009 July 12ALA, Chicago IL

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VIAF participants

Bibliothèque nationale de France Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Library of Congress/NACO OCLC National Library of the Czech Republic Egypt (Bibliotheca Alexandrina) National Library of Australia National Library of Israel Italy (ICCU) National Library of Portugal National Library of Spain National Library of Sweden Swiss National Library Vatican Library

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Goals of the Virtual International Authority File Link national-level authority records Expand the concept of universal bibliographic

control Allow national or regional variations in authorized form

to co-exist Support needs for variations in preferred language,

script and spelling

Play a role in the emerging semantic web

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Scope of VIAF

Personal names Geographic Corporate Title Family Events

Everything but concepts are considered in scope National level, but willing to consider other

sources

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A standard problem:One name, multiple people

Fournier, Marcel

Fournier, Marcel,‡1946-

Fournier,Marcel, ‡1945-

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Another standard problem:One person, multiple personas

Robb, J. D., 1950-

Elly Wilder

Roberts, Nora

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viaf.org/viaf/29541064

Fundamental to VIAF:One persona, many representations

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Matching process

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Brief LC authority

010 n 84044261

040 DLC $c DLC $d DLC

100 1 Larson, Jack.

670 Thomson, V. The cat, c1982: $b t.p. (Jack Larson)

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Enhancing the authorities

Bibliographic

Record

Derived Authorit

y

AuthorityRecord

Enhanced

Authority

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Mining the bibliographic record

LDR 00826ccm 2200289 a 4500 1 ocm10025532 5 20031229650847.0 8 840627s1982 nyuuua n eng 10 $a 84758340 40 $a DLC $c DLC 19 $a 17706440 20 $c $2.95 28 22 $a 48418 $b G. Schirmer 45 2 $b d198006 $b d198007 48 $b va01 $b ve01 $a ka01 50 00 $a M1529.3 $b .T100 1 $a Thomson, Virgil, $d 1896-245 14 $a The cat : $b duet for soprano and baritone / $c Virgil Thomson ; [words by Jack Larson].260 $a New York : $b G. Schirmer, $c c1982.300 $a 1 score (11 p.) ; $c 31 cm.500 $a For soprano, baritone, and piano.650 0 $a Vocal duets with piano.600 10 $a Larson, Jack $x Musical settings.700 1 $a Larson, Jack.

Authors

LC Control Number

LC ClassificationTitl

e

Material Type

Publisher

Place of Publication

Language

Date ofPublication

Usage

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Information in bibliographic records

He is a lyricist His primary subject area is music He was published in the 80s and 90s by G.

Schirmer and Belwin Mills in New York Worked with Virgil Thomson and Gerhard Samuel Jack Larson is the only name he has used on his

publications Etc.

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VIAF data flow

VIAF

VIAFHistory

Deduplication/Disambiguation

Bibs Auths

Bibs AuthsBibs Auths

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Current state

Personal names from 16 files Names are clustered

10.4 million names 8.7 million clusters

Identifiers assigned: http://viaf.org/viaf/77390479

Preliminary work done on geographic names Unicode throughout UNIMARC and MARC-21 supported

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VIAF interface is built on top of SRU

SRU grew out of Z39.50 VIAF is SRU plus URL-rewrite rules and content-

negotiation Also modified to allow the return records without

SRU XML wrapper New query parameter HTTP Accept

http://viaf.org/search?query=cql.any+all+"dempsey"+&http:accept=application/rss+bxml

Allows support of OpenSearch (RSS returned)

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URI Patterns and ‘Linked Data’

VIAF Record

Content negotiation: HTTP headers or SRU extension

Default http://viaf.org/viaf/9855044

Real World Object http://viaf.org/viaf/9855044.rwo

HTML http://viaf.org/viaf/9855044.html

XML http://viaf.org/viaf/9855044.viaf

RDF (FOAF) http://viaf.org/viaf/9855044.rdf

MARC21 http://viaf.org/viaf/9855044.m21

UNIMARC http://viaf.org/viaf/9855044.unimarc

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SRU Searching

Retrieve record by internal control number http://viaf.org/search?query=cql.any+all+"NKC|jn19990008936“

Results list for George Washington http://viaf.org/search

?query=local.mainHeadingEl+all+"george%20washington“&stylesheet=xsl/results.xsl&sortKeys=holdingscount

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Matching

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What makes a match?

1,705,555 Title 846,722 Double date 123,487 Joint author 71,851 LCCN 24,587 Partial date and partial title 11,010 Partial date and publisher 9,179 Partial title and publisher 6,415 Name as subject 3,168 Standard number

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Consensus

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Little consensus

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Date variations are common

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Occasional long chain

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Example

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Search results for Sharabi

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Next steps

More participants More name types (geographics, corporates,…) More variety of sources

Rights agencies, ISNI Regional files Specialized files

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Possible applications within OCLC

FRBR matching Better matching of non-English metadata Uniform identifier across all languages

Authority control for cataloging Better regionalization of WorldCat.org Minimize differences across languages of

cataloging

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Discussion

How would you use VIAF? How important is VIAF? Will anyone use linked-data URIs?