Supporting reconciliation from a library perspective

I’ve recently had the opportunity to briefly present our Community Group and what we do in a lightning talk at SWIB20, this years iteration of the annual (and this year digital) Semantic Web in Libraries conference (slides, video):

OpenRefine, and in particular its reconciliation feature, are widely used in the library world, where authority files are an established part of traditional cataloging workflows. Early reconciliation data sources for library use cases include FAST, VIAF, and VIVO.

Our Open Infrastructure team at hbz is offering a reconciliation service for the Integrated Authority File (GND). The GND is the main authority file in the German-speaking library field. It contains persons and corporations, subject headings, geographical entities, events, and works. With our reconciliation service, we’re building a bridge from a traditional library dataset to new applications within and outside the library domain, e.g. in the (German-speaking) digital humanities. This complements the general development of the GND in recent years, especially within the GND4C project, of opening up organizational structures, processes, data models, and tooling of the GND to other cultural heritage institutions like archives and museums.

Besides services, the library world is also the source of new clients that interact with services using the reconciliation API. Two of the known clients are from the library domain: AlmaRefine and Cocoda. Managing, identifying, and connecting entities is at the very core of librarianship, making it an ideal field for the goals of our Community Group.

Therefore, I’m very happy to join Antonin as co-chair of our group. I’m looking forward to help advancing and promoting our goal of a common protocol for data matching on the Web, both in the library field and beyond.