Authority Control of People and Organizations on the Semantic Web
Jussi Kurki, Eero Hyvönen · 2009
Authors and documents with identical titles are common in the digital library environment. In order to manage identities correctly, authority control is used by library and information scientists for disambiguating and cross-referencing entity names. We argue that the benefits of traditional authority control can be enhanced by using techniques and technologies of the Semantic Web, leading to simpler management of multiple languages, better linkability of resources, simpler reuse of authority registries in applications, and less work in indexing. To demonstrate our propositions, we have created a prototype of an ontology server and service called ONKI People that is used in two ways: First, it is a centralized authority service providing human end-users with efficient and easy to use authority finding and disambiguation services based on faceted semantic search and visualizations. The services are available online also as AJAX and Web Services API for machines to use. Second, the underlying RDF triple store can be used as a content resource in applications