Authify: The Reconciliation of Entities at Scale

Abstract

Libraries’ shift to the semantic web has been underway for a number of years. Mellon funded projects such as Linked Data for Production (LD4P) [1] or the BIBFRAME European Workshop 2018 in Florence [2] show the commitment of national, public, and academic libraries, as well as vendors, to this transition. Libraries worldwide, however, are enmeshed in hundreds of millions of metadata records communicated through flat files (the MARC formats) [3]. The shift to linked data will require the conversion of these flat files to a semantically expressive model such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) [4]. The conversion of such large amounts of semantically inexpressive data to semantically rich data will require automated enhancements in the conversion process. Data hidden within the flat files, such as role (author, illustrator, composer, etc.), can greatly aid with the reconciliation of entities within those files. Authify is one of the first tools available to libraries to both convert their metadata to linked data, but also enrich the reconciliation process with semantic data hidden within the MARC fields. As libraries look to convert their legacy data to linked data, Authify can help them move their data to the Web in as a semantically rich way as possible.