Hi Karen
Thanks for the code. As far as I can see though it doesn't actually
solve my disambiguation problem - since identity_info.php just takes a
name as input, it can't guess which of the people with this name is
meant other than by using the most commonly referenced one, which in the
OCLC data actually seems to often be an amalgam of several people with
the name; for example
http://worldcat.org/identities/viaf-DNB|100804799
is William Morris, the 18th century African-American engineer whose most
widely held works include News from Nowhere, Introduction to Fly
Fishing, and Ancient Slavery Disapproved of by God - ie an amalgamation
of the various most famous people known by this name.
I guess this is just a hard problem overall.
Graham
On 05/19/11 14:56, Karen Coombs wrote:
> Graham,
>
> I'd advocate using WorldCat Identities to get to the appropriate url
> for dbpedia. Each Identity record has a wikipedia element in it that
> you could use to link to either Wikipedia or dbpedia.
>
> If you want to see an example of this in action you can check out the
> Author Info demo I did for code4lib 2010 here -
> http://www.librarywebchic.net/mashups/author_info/info_about_this_author.php?OCLCNum=32939031
>
> The code for this demo is available for download at -
> http://www.worldcat.org/devnet/code/devnetDemos/trunk/
>
> You'll want the author_info folder and identity_info.php
>
> Karen
>
> Karen A. Coombs
> Product Manager
> OCLC Developer Network
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
> On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 4:40 AM, graham <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> I need to be able to take author data from a catalogue record and use it
>> to look up the author on Wikipedia on the fly. So I may have birth date
>> and possibly year of death in addition to (one spelling of) the name,
>> the title of one book the author wrote etc.
>>
>> I know there are various efforts in progress that will improve the
>> current situation, but as things stand at the moment what is the best*
>> way to do this?
>>
>> 1. query wikipedia for as much as possible, parse and select the best
>> fitting result
>>
>> 2. go via dbpedia/freebase and work back from there
>>
>> 3. use VIAF and/or OCLC services
>>
>> 4. Other?
>>
>> (I have no experience of 2-4 yet :-(
>>
>>
>> Thanks
>> Graham
>> * 'best' being constrained by:
>> - need to do this in real-time
>> - need to avoid dependence on services which may be taken away
>> or charged for
>> - being able to justify to librarians as reasonably accurate :-)
>>
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