Karen,
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   - Identities in WorldCat are based on literary warrant, i.e., names for
   people who authored/edited something or were subject in someone else's
   literary work. Personal names in WikiPedia are not entered according to
   literary warrant. Nor is their form vetted according to NAF.
   - Ludvig van Beethoven doesn't need much disambiguation. Nor does Mark
   Twain.
   - So yes, Karen/Ralph/Tom --  how exactly is Wikipedia used for
   disambiguation? are you certain it's used for THAT purpose? if yes, can you
   send us a proper example? Morris, William seems a good example.

Ya'aqov


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*On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 3:48 PM, Graham Seaman <[log in to unmask]>wrote:
*
>
> *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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ya'aqovZISO | [log in to unmask] | 856 217 3456

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