Month: June 2017

Linking data about people through the ISNI

I would like to propose a session on the International Standard Name Identifier (ISO 27729). The ISNI identifies persons and corporate bodies.
The session will provide an update on how the ISNI system works and how it relates to its base file the Virtual International Authority File which currently links identities from over 50 national library authority files worldwide. The ISNI extends the scope of VIAF by linking to identities expressed in other domains including rights management organisations, publishers, archives and data agencies.
ISNI is built from authoritative data assertions about people which can be connected at scale by running matching algorithms. Unlike VIAF the ISNI system supports the ongoing creation of new identifiers and curation of the links that form the integrity of the identifier itself. As the database and its active contributors grow in scale the expectations on the reliability of the ISNI grow with it. Its potential for the secure identification of rights holders in automated transactions requires robust maintenance and curation of the links on which it is built and the links that it generates as it is diffused widely as linked open data., but it will grow by
I am interested in sharing the experiences of working with ISNI to manage personal and corporate identities and engage in a wider discussion on the challenges of managing linked data entities such as personal identifiers across multiple domains. The experiences of ISNI cover linking diverse data sets, identifying and fixing false links (cluster errors), crowd sourcing, merging duplicate identifiers and splitting metadata from mixed identities, quality sampling, handling pseudonyms and hierarchical relationships.